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Whoa!!!

Non-elites are now eligible for mileage upgrades on Series 0 rewards with a co-pay??? That is a pretty significant change. I'm not sure it will really affect availability, but it is a good thing for non-elites, I suppose.

why do I have the feeling that day of flight CO will 1st check to see if theres anyone on the waitlist before handing out any EUAs or Airport Upgrades to Elites. why would they give an Elite even a Plat on an ElCheapo a free UP when theres someone willing to part with 15k in miles and $150,

if you thought getting that UP was hard till now, we havent seen anything yet

Quote:

Originally Posted by craz

why do I have the feeling that day of flight CO will 1st check to see if theres anyone on the waitlist before handing out any EUAs or Airport Upgrades to Elites. why would they give an Elite even a Plat on an ElCheapo a free UP when theres someone willing to part with 15k in miles and $150,

if you thought getting that UP was hard till now, we havent seen anything yet

That would not be right for them to do that, but we would never know.

The current policy is that anyone trying to use miles always takes priority over the freebies, both at EUA runs and at the airport. No reason to believe that will change. That being said, the verbiage that says only elites may waitlist for Series 0 rewards remains, so it seems that this will not affect folks at the airport since non-elites can't waitlist. Then again, the fact that there is a mention of refunding the fee if the upgrade doesn't complete suggests that this may be changing.

I just want it known that when I am footing the bill for a flight, I will fly Southwest. They do not charge a fee for luggage, and have a great cancellation policy - NO FEE.

Continental - you are going to drive your business into the bankruptcy if you continue down this path.

Hi Everyone, this past week, we made a couple changes to our OnePass mileage upgrade policies - all with the intention to make them easier to use.

1. Domestic upgrades available for all members and all published fares. Previously, customers who weren’t Elite members could only use miles to upgrade a domestic itinerary when booked in select fare classes (which excluded O, V, U, Q, I, S, W, T, X and L). Now, our domestic upgrade reward (Series 0) allows upgrades to be redeemed in conjunction with all published fare classes. The fare classes that were previously excluded will simply have an upgrade service fee ranging from $50 to $150 depending on the fare class. And yes, Elite members will continue to be able to redeem Series 0 rewards without upgrade service fees. The full details are now posted at continental.com.
   
   
2. The H class upgrade copay for Hawaii is now $100, not $200. It’s a minor change, but nonetheless it’s for the good. Effective Nov. 15th, the H Class upgrade service fee for Hawaii BusinessFirst upgrades will be lowered to $100, making it consistent with our $100 H class copay for all other BusinessFirst upgrade rewards.

You’re right craz, when it comes to First Class, our goal is to fill it with fare-paying customers. This includes customers willing to pay with mileage rewards. The concern is a fair one, but it won’t happen very often. If our BusinessFirst and Latin America/Caribbean (Series 1) waitlist volumes are any indication, the number of customers waitlisting for domestic Series 0 upgrades will hardly be noticeable. Most of the time, we’ll see this when a customer was able to confirm the upgrade on one leg of a connection but not the other. In these cases especially, we believe allowing the waitlist (and subsequent airport standby) for the upgrade is the right thing to do.

Hi sbm12, as mentioned above, we'll be removing the waitlist and airport standby restrictions from all of our upgrade rewards. This was already the case for everything except for customers without Elite status redeeming domestic Series 0 rewards. In these cases, we found that denying the waitlist didn’t really have a bearing on behavior. It just made things harder for all of us. Customers would still continually poll continental.com and/or call us until the seats were available.

We’ll be updating continental.com to reflect the waitlist policy and the upgrade copay refundability before the end of the week.

As a first time Elite, I certainly appreciate this. I can think of several flights where it would have been especially nice to be able to upgrade after buying the discount fares. For most folks, I just don't see them thinking that paid F is worth it for the 3 hour flight to visit grandma. The upgrade option will make people reconsider (although I can already see the size upgrade standby list for the transcons crashing the CO servers).