Jonathan2712

It looks like I will likely fall a little short of Gold this year, and rather than fly for the sake of the points, I’d like to upgrade a few of my existing ET flights to CE in order to cover the TP shortfall. I fly weekly between DUB and LHR/ LCY, in the past I was able to book these flights myself and expense them, and as such paid upgrades were easily done in the app. Now I must get them booked by the corporate travel agent, and the paid upgrade option no longer appears in the app. Is there a way that I can upgrade these tickets with cash? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, the perks of Gold mean a lot if you have to do over 150 Y sectors per year – and amazingly BA wont just give you gold automatically at this stage!

Thanks
Jonathan

Emma Cocker

I think it depends if the travel agent has paid the ticket in full and assigned the booking to you. It would also need to be an upgradeable fare (which it may not be, if the agent receives corporate discount).

I think you will need to speak to the travel agent, but I'm sure someone much wiser than me will be along to correct me in due course!

corporate-wage-slave

Some corporate travel agents offer POUGs - primarily those based in the UK and invoicing in sterling - but many do not. If you are not regularly seeing POUG offers then you may as well stop looking, other than at OLCI there may be a small number coming through at that point. You're probably stuck on this one, since it won't be BA who own your ticket, it will the the travel agent. You can also look at AUPs at the airport, that won't be affected by this. AUPs are not offered at LCY but I think they are in DUB.

More details of AUPs and POUGs in the relevant threads in the BA Forum Dashboard.

BertieBadger

You can certainly upgrade such tickets on the day at the airport (but not LCY apparently), subject to availability. This is known as an AUP (Airport UPgrade) and sample prices are tracked in this thread here:

Airport Upgrades (AUP) promotion 2019 thread

In the DUB-LHR direction, an ET -> CE upgrade seems to fall in the GBP80- EUR110 range. Depending on how many TP you need and what classes you are booking into in ET, this might be your best option.

Jonathan2712

Thank you all very much, I will see if I can upgrade at the airport the next few times that I fly, I need around 150 TPs and although this isn't the cheapest way of doing it, it is the least time consuming as I would be flying anyway.

BertieBadger

Apologies if I am teaching granny to suck eggs here, but if you have a lot of flights it is probably worth checking what booking classes they have booked into in ET.

On that route ET could earn 5, 10 or 20 TP depending on what class you are booked into, whereas CE always earns 40TP. So an AUP could net an additional 20, 30 or 35 TPs - if you have any booked into the 5TP classes (Q,O,G booking codes) I would suggest targeting those ones for upgrade to get the most bang for your buck in terms of extra TPs.