Hello! My wife and I are flying on flight 169, LAX to NRT on O fare class, Oct 15th. I no longer have status with AA but was hoping to do a miles + copay award upgrade to business. Is the likelihood of this clearing close to zero? I don’t have enough AA miles, so if there’s no realistic chance I’d rather not deal with converting Marriott points. Thank you for any advice.

Thank you! When would you recommend I check back here with everyone and look at transferring miles? 3 weeks or so prior to flight?

By the way if it is still possible for you, maybe you can consider AA27 LAX-HND which is operated by a 77W (with 52J rather than 30J on the 789). Even if it doesn’t clear, Haneda is much closer to Tokyo city than Narita anyways.

Wanted to share my experiences since I get so much great info from this site. Traveling on a government fare from the US, with the intl leg of ORD-LHR. FYI SWUs cannot be used in conjunction with govt fares. I booked back in feb and made a mileage/co-pay upgrade request then. I checked EF daily about two weeks out, and two days prior to departure I was checking hourly and happened to wake up at 3 AM one day; I checked EF and lo and behold AA had released 3 C seats on my outbound. Called EXPLAT line and they got me in.

On my return, two days out J appeared full on EF. I was sad. Then one full day out one seat opened up, but no C space on EF. The night before departure (about T-18) I checked EF and not only was there a fresh C seat, but it was a coveted window seat midcabin on a Dreamliner. I called EXPLAT line and at first she said she couldn’t help me. I asked her to check C space again and she found it and snagged me that window seat. Lesson for me is persistence and that EF is truly invaluable!

What’s not clear to me is how these requests are prioritized. I know I’m high on the list because of when I made the request (and I have a decent rolling EQD), but did I get the seat because I was proactive and called, or because I was at the top of the list and might have cleared anyway? Both times I called the EXPLAT line I was immediately cleared.

Hello everyone!

My wife and I are applying SWU to LAX to SYD.
Wed 8/28 returning Wed 9/4.

EXP 20300 rolling EQD.

I do not have expert flyer. It looks like there’s only 15 seats in business class available for the flight out and only 3 out of 30 taken on the return flight.

Does anyone have success being upgraded on this particular flight using SWU?

Thanks All.

CJ

sometimes I check loads and open seats for the same days of the week but in the next week or two to see if there’s a pattern on loads.

You probably snagged the seats because of your timing but you may have been pretty high on the list anyway depending on how much your rolling EQD is. Time of request doesn’t really matter practically speaking since it only breaks ties in the event of the exactly the same EQD and fare class.

absurd is the following:

EXP with 32k rolling EQD. I have been able to use zero EVIPs this year and have been upgraded exactly twice all year, both times on the coveted SJC-LAX route. And I requalified in April through Jan 2021. To be fair, I did get one upgrade on DFW-SJC but had to decline since I was with a companion and only one seat was available (we were 1 and 2 on the list out of 20+ people). After I complete my next AA trip this week, I’ll direct my spend elsewhere for the rest of the year and get status elsewhere since the biggest perk of status has been inaccessible so far.