seekinghelp

After several years of only flying once at Christmas, I have a new job and will be flying almost every week on Alaska.

I'm a nobody. I have no status, but I'm shooting for Gold by July. Wish me luck.

Also wanted to say thanks to everyone on here. Over the course of the last few hours of surfing your threads, I feel a lot smarter.

If anyone has more advice to make the next couple months easier, I'm all eyes. So far I have the following:

Get Precheck
Burn my miles to get upgraded? (I have a couple hundred K left and will have plenty later)
I'm debating a monthly parking pass at Seatac. Anyone have experience with it?
Beg for some gold upgrades from my friends


Once I get Precheck, I'm hoping there will be a fast way through security since I won't have a bag (no luggage, laptop, liquids). Just cellphone and plastic ID and Credit Cards. Let me know if you have any ideas. I don't think I can get through the metal detector with a cell phone in my pocket. Thoughts?

roastpuff

Instead of just Pre-check, look into getting Global Entry as well. Great if you're traveling internationally as well.

seekinghelp

Great advice. I was approved, but my interview is in July. Wow, July!

John

CDKing

GE interview is in July? If so keep checking the schedule and see if any open up in a city you can get a long enough connect in. That and cancellations

missydarlin

If you have a set schedule and a bunch of flights already ticketed, you could try asking for a challenge or comp to MVP.

Personally, I wouldn't spend miles on upgrades.

evoG

Many successful reports of being handled as a walk-in, myself included. I would try popping by the sign up office or calling whenever you happen to be at the airport.

I too would not burn miles for an upgrade. you'll be swimming in comp UGs soon enough.

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Tried calling a couple times for GE but got lucky @ SAT before the AUS Mega DO mmm BBQ. I checked daily for airports I was visiting and SAT opened up days before flying thru- so I booked it and was able to get in early. ^

ctporter

As of March 11, all 5 checkpoints will have a precheck lane, so congestion should be eased considerably. Just go with the one nearest where you want to be on the sterile side. Or, start at 5 and look at the line to see if they are merging non pre's or if that line seems to have a large number of clueless (you will see them start to take stuff out) if so move on down to checkpoint 4 after the 11th of March. You will NOT be able to carry the cell phone through, just put it in one of the little round tubs they have for you.