McDMan

Hello,

I am flying from SFO TO HK on Alaska's partner airline, Cathay Pacific in Business Class in March 2016. However, I live in Vancouver and the award travel (for my family of 5) includes airfare to the gateway city in the same fare 'class'. In this case, we are being routed from YVR to SFO via SEA. We have been 'waitlisted' in 1st class until the award level seats are released/available.

Can someone please tell me how this 'waitlist' process works in my particular case? Will we be automatically upgraded at the 72hr mark if seats are available? What is our priority versus MVP and MVP gold?

Any help is much appreciated....

Thanks, Charles

PDXPremier

You are waitlisted for saver first award space on the AS segment which is A class, not U class which is typically more abundant since that is what all the elite upgrades book into (many times U class will open up and not A class so in that sense, all AS and DL elites will be ahead of you for upgrades). A class seats on AS are not very abundant although they tend to show up more frequently on west coast routes so all hope is not lost, but if A class does open up, it's probably going to be 1 or 2 seats, no where close to 5. If you are all on the same record then 5 A class seats will need to be open at the same time in order for you to clear and that's very unlikely to happen so pick out some decent seats in coach and look forward to CX business class on the long flight. Your other option is to keep an eye out for open business class award seats on the YVR-HKG direct flight....J/F tends to open up 1-3 days prior to departure then you don't have to bother with the 2 domestic segments.

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+)

My family of 4 were waitlisted for SFO-SEA-ANC returning from Italy (flew KL biz) this summer. Only I cleared, and this was at the gate.

CDKing

As mentioned above you will be in coach. They will release U space long before A. I've never been upgraded later on even as a solo traveler. They would rather give the seat to a DL silver than a 75K on a J/F award

McDMan

Thanks for everyone's replys...I guess I got lucky then...

I am flying back with my son from HK and my wife and other kids and Grandma are flying back 1 week later. I just re-checked my domestic flight from LAX to SEA and YVR and just saw that my waitlisted flight was already upgraded to first on the LAX to SEA portion...

Question: I have 2.5hrs from when I land in LAX from HK to go to SEA. Can anyone please tell if I will need to go thru customs at LAX or when I land at YVR?

Thanks, Charles

PABE

I'm assuming you're flying HKG-LAX-SEA-YVR?
You will go through US immigration at LAX and Canadian immigration at YVR.

CDKing

Thanks for report back. Time for you to buy a lotto ticket

JoJo12

I have a CX business class award booked about 6 months ago, BKK-HKG-LAX-PDX on March 1. My LAX-PDX just cleared First about 2 weeks ago. I am the only traveller on this PNR.

mczlaw

Similar experience, but w EK F award DXB-LAX. Originally, Y only on the LAX-PDX final segment, but notified of move to F a few weeks ago (6 months or so after booking, 3 months before the flight). I've had this occur at least a couple of other times in the past from LAX and SFO.

--mcz