is asiamiles waitlisting a scam so we are forced to call up and pay change fee?

If you are waitlisting and don't have a ticket anyway, you do not pay change fees.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A501 Safari/9537.53)

Or if i hv a ticket?

mate i totally sympathize, i wish CX would nail down the waitlist glitches. I haven't had any issues since last May, although I guess cheering a 9 month (personal) hiatus for waitlist mistakes is indicative of how poor the function is to begin with. Great in theory. But poorly executed.

The worst to me is when you're waitlisting for a J-F upgrade, and then you randomly check one day and see partner availability on the British Airways site. And you call AM, and they say "oh yes sir! Availability is open." And you're like, um, what is the purpose of the waitlist then?

And of course, you think in your mind how many times did you sit patiently on the "waitlist" assuming you'd clear if availability opened, but it never did. how many of those instances were awards released to partners, bypassing the waitlist and you were just clueless about it?

do you have to have a ba account in order to check partner upgrade availability?

I'm wait listed on 2 of the 4 legs on my Oct trip. I have called a few times and they state that there's no availability. Would love to call BS on mpc.

there is no such thing as partner upgrade availability....only Asia Miles can be used to upgrade.

And if anecdotes here are any lesson, it seems like AM/MPC treat upgrades vs straight redemptions from different buckets. Very annoying but that seems to be the case based on a lot of anecdotes here. So it could theoretically be possible a redemption award was visible on BA's website (in which case it will also be available as straight redemption via calling AM/MPC), but NOT as an upgrade redemption. I'm not endorsing this nonsense, but repeating what I think are the facts unfortunately.

The best way to see if they're playing games is to ignore the BA website (which shows phantom availability anyway), and call MPC / AM and ask if they have full redemptions available. Aka not upgrade redemptions. Never have I come across - nor read on here - where partners have availability that AM doesn't. On the contrary, AM/MPC often has inventory that isn't yet released to partners. Either way, your problem can be solved by calling AM/MPC. If they tell you there's availability for a pure redemption - but not available for upgrade - then you have your answer. Two different buckets unfortunately.

They are incompetent a lot of the times, but they don't lie about availability.

actually - I think upgrade and straight redemptions are actually from the same bucket.

i thought so too, but it seems people here have reported upgrade redemption isn't available, even though Asia Miles shows straight redemption? Or are they possibly mistaken?

ergh...tx for the info .... guess I'll have to keep my fingers crossed