Does AA offer Day of Departure Paid Upgrades to International J
 

I am thinking of making the switch from DL to AA for my 150,000 Miles per year I travel for MR vacations. But I have a question.

KLM (DL partner I love to travel on) offers paid upgrades on their Business Class seat if they are empty to anyone regardless of fare class with both cash and cash+miles options.

Does AA offer this? Or at least a cash+miles scenario?

I fly to far away places like HKG and JNB regularly for MRs and would love to know if I at least have a chance to pay less than $500 to UG to J.

Thanks. :)

Stating the obvious, yes, of course you can upgrade your ticket just before departure with the right amount of cash. The devil's in the details, as always.

I am not referring to paying the cash difference between my very low-class fare and J. LoL :p

yes, you have a chance of being offered upgrades for cash on day of departure. That chance, however, is pretty slim depending on route & day of travel.

IME that's true. Since AA has been mass-producing EXPs this year, people are trying to use SWUs in record numbers. I fly TPAC primarily; and the only route on which I ever see empty F or J seats these days is ICN/DFW. Never on HKG flights and only very, very rarely on NRT.

OP seems to be talking TATL hence KLM. So the real question would be does BA allow it. That sadly I dont have the answer to :/

cash & miles, yes. The standard AAdvantage upgrade award across the Atlantic or Pacific has a $350 co-pay associated to it, and when there's inventory available you can snag one at any time before the flight.

Discounted cash upgrades - sometimes. See the LBFU thread referenced above. There's no pattern to when these are offered, and I've only seen this twice on very empty flights (MXP-MIA). One cannot count on them being offered at all.

All AAdvantage upgrade instruments are always good on any regular fare. Unlike UA and DL, one does not need to buy into a certain higher-priced fare class to be eligible for upgrades.

When you travel transatlantic, AA JV partners AY and BA both offer discounted day-of-departure cash upgrades on their flights, also good from any fare. While those on AY get you into business, BA will upgrade you to premium economy, so beware!

BA does cash upgrades before their flights. You just ask and if available they'll give you a price. I've upgraded from Y+ to J and J to F for about 300£-500£. There's a thread in the BA forum about prices paid on different routes. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...ns-thread.html

Hell, you can pick up F on DFW-ICN RT for under $5k at times.

And much less if you start at ICN.

Any dates/examples of this?

Thats almost as much for 1 trip as I spent this year getting EXP with all INTL (4 x SEA-DFW-HKG-*) trips upgraded with SWUs :p

Since I've been looking at a lot of NYC/ICN fares today, I'll give you one. Oct. 14-23, ICN-DFW-LGA r/t. $2870, First Class.

Edit: Also similar for direct ICN/DFW, i.e. Oct. 13-23.

I'm taking the ICN-NRT-LAX-JFK routing on Tuesday for the extra 12K miles on LAX-JFK.