Upgrade data collection
Feb 8, 2005 | 8:06 pm
#1
Original Poster
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 1,613
Upgrade data collection
Some careful use of the search tool 
found this wonderful and careful study of which flights, days of the week, and times of day were best for upgrades. There is some surprising information in there, at least to me as a relative newbie to CO and EUA (so Friday is good for upgrades! who knew?). However, the data collected is for CO flights out of the Bay Area only, and it's for 2002. It's now 2005, and I'm interested in doing some data collection to match what thesilb and his buddies did in that exercise.
Basically it seems that what they did is use an availability tool (they used http://www.flyaow.com/classavailability.htm) to follow A and F availability 6, 4, 2 and 1 day out from flights. That still seems like the best way to get info on upgrade chances, although nowadays you can only track A and D (as well as Z, which is less useful). Is there some other info that other people can suggest that would also be useful? For example, does availability in Y tell you anything about your chances of scoring an upgrade? Any suggestions on what else is worth tracking? Aircraft type seems the main one to me, for the flights where the operating aircraft varies over the schedule. thesilb, do you have any suggestions based on your experience?
And, assuming that what thesilb did is still the way to go, is anyone willing to volunteer to collect this kind of data daily for one or two routes? I live in BOS and am planning to collect data for BOS-IAH (and BOS-EWR-HOU when it flies) and over the next six weeks (and whether or not anyone else is interested, I intend to post some results for that when it's done) . But it would be great if other people were interested in volunteering to collect data for their own favorite route. We could probably set up a standard Excel template to use, so it would just be a matter of visiting an availability site and copying down (2 numbers) x 4 'day windows' x # of flights you're tracking, each day, which can't take more than 5 minutes once you're used to it. I'll volunteer* to do the analysis afterwards to get the same kind of summary statistics that the Bay Area fliers produced to help FT'ers choose the right flights. Anyone else interested in this?
* = provided we don't get 1000 people volunteering ... I haven't got that much time...
found this wonderful and careful study of which flights, days of the week, and times of day were best for upgrades. There is some surprising information in there, at least to me as a relative newbie to CO and EUA (so Friday is good for upgrades! who knew?). However, the data collected is for CO flights out of the Bay Area only, and it's for 2002. It's now 2005, and I'm interested in doing some data collection to match what thesilb and his buddies did in that exercise.Basically it seems that what they did is use an availability tool (they used http://www.flyaow.com/classavailability.htm) to follow A and F availability 6, 4, 2 and 1 day out from flights. That still seems like the best way to get info on upgrade chances, although nowadays you can only track A and D (as well as Z, which is less useful). Is there some other info that other people can suggest that would also be useful? For example, does availability in Y tell you anything about your chances of scoring an upgrade? Any suggestions on what else is worth tracking? Aircraft type seems the main one to me, for the flights where the operating aircraft varies over the schedule. thesilb, do you have any suggestions based on your experience?
And, assuming that what thesilb did is still the way to go, is anyone willing to volunteer to collect this kind of data daily for one or two routes? I live in BOS and am planning to collect data for BOS-IAH (and BOS-EWR-HOU when it flies) and over the next six weeks (and whether or not anyone else is interested, I intend to post some results for that when it's done) . But it would be great if other people were interested in volunteering to collect data for their own favorite route. We could probably set up a standard Excel template to use, so it would just be a matter of visiting an availability site and copying down (2 numbers) x 4 'day windows' x # of flights you're tracking, each day, which can't take more than 5 minutes once you're used to it. I'll volunteer* to do the analysis afterwards to get the same kind of summary statistics that the Bay Area fliers produced to help FT'ers choose the right flights. Anyone else interested in this?
* = provided we don't get 1000 people volunteering ... I haven't got that much time...
