PV_Premier

looking at a ticket on June 5th:

DL2245 RSW 2:20 pm MSP 4:53 pm
AS39 MSP 7:20 pm SEA 8:55 pm
AS372 SEA 9:40 pm SMF 11:18 pm

able to be purchased in either Y or F on alaskaair.com, but when i try to get a fare that can be upgraded with an AS MVPG guest upgrade, the flights are not offered as an option.

what would cause that?

seems like it has to do with AS372, since i can purchase DL2245/AS39/AS805 when choosing MVP Gold Guest upgrade.

dgreen12

Both AS flights have U space available for Gold Guest Upgrades....

What about buying online and then calling in to ask for assistance to apply the upgrade coupon? You've got the ability to cancel within 24 hours.

alphaeagle

Search for it by choosing price rather than by schedule, it'll show up then.

You also have tp choose the upgrade preference, otherwise it'll show a non-upgradeable SEA-SMF flight.

ANC

I get the same issues when booking to or from CWA and MSN. I actually can book one ways but if I try to book round trips half the time the RT I want doesnt show up but I can book it as one ways. The only thing I can think of is that it has to do with glitches in the partner airlines codes. But I think you are actually better off booking the lowest fare and then call in and have the AS segments upfared individually to the upgrade fare level. I have found this to be the case when booking all AS/QX flights. For instance if you want to book a gold upgradable and you search for it, it shows all the flights in H code, even the QX flights even though you cant even upgrade on QX. Just book it all in G T L etc class and then call in and have the AS metal segments upfared to H class, pay the difference and upgrade. Thats part of the problem with the AS site when searching for guest upgrade, gold upgrade, mileage, mvp upgrade fares etc.....if you search for MVP upgrade fares it searches B or higher for all segments likewise for gold upgrades H or higher for all segments regardless of iif it involves partners or QX flights that dont even qualify. Because of that, sometimes when partners are involved, the prices are so outlandish that they dont even show up as an option on the AS site even though its really an available flight

PV_Premier

thanks for the insights all. it doesn't have to do with the upgrade space not being open currently on AS372, i don't think, because flights w/o upgrade space are routinely offered as options for purchase even when asking to apply an upgrade (including in this case).

note that i am trying to book this as a one way and not a r/t. it's sort of a moot point right now because i have to book it on our corporate travel portal and i can't get the flight combination to pull up there anyways. need to try multi-city and see if i can make it work that way.

edit to add:
i managed to get this booked, it booked into L/L/G, so i had to call in and fare up the SEA-SMF segment ($10 add collect) and then customer support had to manually add in the MVPG guest upgrade on the back end which cleared for both AS39 and AS372. all told took about 15 minutes on the phone, not so bad. the only thing is that even with the DL confirmation number it will not allow me to choose a seat for the RSW-MSP segment on .dumb. oh well. better chance of ending up in economy comfort for free.

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+)

Might take 24 hours to allow seat selection on DL.

ANC

It usually doesnt take that long but it does take a while longer than AA. With AA you can almost instantly go to AA and select seats, Im guessing because AS and AA use virtually the same system. Usually you can select AA main line right on the AS sight with the exception of MCE seats because on AS it shows them as occupied and it for whatever unknown reason doesnt allow seat selection for "American Connections" flights operated by "insert crappy airline here"

PV_Premier

i tweeted DL assist and they got me hooked up. unfortunately exit rows sans 27B were full already, so had to drum up some seat alerts on EF. at least with the 757 the upgrade chances are measurable (though still small).