What do you mean by make it easy to look up? It's all over the app and profile page. Unless you mean last year's LPs?
Also curious what you mean about 250k being where you can end up for this status year. The 300-400 from last year isn't what your upgrade was based off since it's a rolling 12 month.

Traveled over the holiday weekend and the only upgrades that cleared at the gate were pilots deadheading.

I believe he means the last 12 months of rolling LPs, which is not listed anywhere. You can determine it by clicking a bunch of buttons, and modifying the activity period (fill in the two date fields with the calendar pickers) to get the results. It would be easy if the app/website posted it, or provided a radio button for “12 month rolling LPs.”

I’ve found that GPT is decent at taking a copy of the website dumped into Excel and converting it into a table without much prompting. I’ve done this every quarter-ish to get the rolling number / breakout of LPs by category.

:rolleyes:

I traveled over the holiday as well and I assure you I'm not a pilot:

DEN-LAX, CR7, Friday July 4, 530pm: complimentary upgrade cleared at 100 hours

LAX-HND, 788, Saturday July 5, scheduled 0125am: SWU (Y-->J) cleared off wait-list at about 4.5 hours prior to scheduled departure. flight subsequently delayed for ~11 hours. Still enjoyed my J seat.

Well, I guess technically neither of those were at the gate.

EXP, around 300k rolling LP.

I am a very newly minted Gold with $40.1k LPs who scored an upgrade DFW-PVR on 7/5 with a basic economy fare. There were 12 people behind me on upgrade list with no one on standby list. Help me make sense of this

I am coming to AA side from DL

Flying over the 4th of July weekend can be an upgrade goldmine.

Go buy a lotto ticket

That. Upgrades can just be incredibly day and time specific and highly variable from market to market. As posted above, I (Plat with far fewer LPs than 40K) recently was upgraded well in advance on a PHX-DFW flight when on the same itinerary I did not clear STS-PHX on an E75 with a very very generous F:Y seating ratio.

I always buy first when I need/really want to be in first. And I am usually good at predicting ahead of time when I will or will not be upgraded, when a flight will or will not go out full (I once did this for a living, after all) But even with that, every once in a while I have wound up buying a paid F ticket and wound up with an empty seat next to me in F on a hub-to-hub flight (CLT-DFW)

This thread is really just a collection of anecdotes with minimal predictive value. Other than the patently obvious like you will almost never get upgraded DFW>NYC/PHL/WAS/ATL on a Monday morning or NYC/PHL/WAS/ATL>DFW on a Thursday afternoon, visit this thread for entertaining anecdotes rather than predictive analytics.

Thanks for the insight Herb. You seem like you have some deep knowledge.

Can you provide more of the "obvious" ones like the aforementioned Monday morning Thursday afternoon? I'm not sure of the routes and times to avoid that have a surplus of business travelers.

Saturday afternoons/Sunday mornings in business markets would always be better bets to clear an upgrade due to lack of business travel. In leisure markets though, the opposite might be a decent generalization. Leisure markets I'd be more inclined to roll the dice midweek but if it's a "leisure" market with decent paid F/J demand (think cruise ports or anywhere rich people go) or convention town (LAS/ORL), then all bets are off.

(LAS is actually a strange market. It has surprisingly strong paid F demand)

I used to fly DFW-ATL quite often and spread the love around between AA and DL. I was fascinated by the complete imbalance of upgrade lists. DFW origin was extremely heavy on AA Monday mornings while ATL origin was extremely heavy on DL Monday mornings. Flip that around for the Thursday afternoon returns.

If you have the flexibility to wait until closer in to book, or at least the flexibility to leverage no change fees or free award res redeposits, you can always change to flights that give you a better shot. But, again, mind the advance booking curve. This is a sweeping generalization but business markets take their bookings close in while leisure markets take their bookings far out.

Thus, last summer, when I saw a Saturday night DFW-ALB flight was being operated by an A321 rather than A320, I figured the nearly empty seat map a couple weeks out told me what I needed to know about whether to spend money buying an upgrade/upfare to F. I did not. My upgrade cleared. The fun anecdote though was that I think the flight went out with 11 pax in F. Guess who the one pax to NOT have an empty F seat next to him was?

What about markets like LAX/SNA-JFK?
Not sure if this would be a business or leisure market, or what the pattern would be.

I really don't know. Obviously LA-NY is a huge market with tons of all kinds of travel but beyond that I really don't know the specifics of demand peaks. There's also a ton of international feed on both ends (LAX, not SNA!) to complicate matters. No strong opinion there. For me, any transcon is clearly a WFBF situation!

I would make an educated guess that SNA-JFK yields are much higher than LAX-JFK with load factors being lower.

With paid upgrades there is no longer the predictability as in the past. You can be a high spend EXP or even CK and miss an upgrade on a CR900/E175. You can be a lowly GLD and get upgraded on a DFW/LAX type of flight. It just depends on how many people on the flight will bite for a cash upgrade and to a lesser extend deadheading pilots, the latter more seen on trunk routes. And since that has very little predictability you should assume that if you really want to be upfront pay to be there. Otherwise, prepare for steerage but hope for the best, an upgrade, preferably ahead of the gate.

I understand enough about the unpredictably of upgrades and that a Saturday of a holiday weekend is favorable. I just don't understand how I could be ahead of 12 people on an upgrade list as a Gold on a Basic Economy fare. Did my 40k LPs really put 12 golds behind me who were also on BE fares? That seems extreme.