Delta One GUC Inventory Availability
 

I am planning a trip to Australia / New Zealand and I'm trying to squeeze the most value out of 4 global upgrade certificates by getting D1 upgrades on the long flights there and back.

I'm exploring lots of different itineraries and dates to find a situation that works, but I think ideally it would be a multi-city ticket that went from LAX-AKL (Auckland, NZ) and SYD-LAX, or vice versa, so that we only have to fly between the two countries once.

I see D1 upgrade availability both ways for LAX-AKL and AKL-LAX during our target month (generally a couple weeks in October, with maybe a week of cushion on either side if the tickets are there) but D1 inventory for the SYD flights is much spottier. I have found a few dates with availability, but it's hit or miss (both to and from Sydney) in spite of there being plenty of available D1 seats.

Is there some system for knowing when there will be D1 availability? I've noticed that you can get D1 upgrades for basically any date in June or July, but it starts getting spottier in August or September for the same flights. Is this because Delta is forecasting stronger demand for revenue D1 tickets in those months? Or will they eventually open them up for upgrade certificate availability?

What would be my best tactic for ensuring D1 seats on those flights? Buy one now, wait for the other? Wait for both? Lock in whatever availability they have now and plan the rest of the trip around that?

Thanks!

The short answer is no.

The slightly longer answer is that upgrade inventory is tied to Z class, the lowest revenue fare class for Delta One. Loosely speaking, the amount of available Z is a function of the forecast sales which should have already occurred for that flight given the time until departure, minus the number of seats actually sold. The first term is an increasing function of time, and the second term should equal the first except to the degree that you want to try to outsmart Delta's demand modeling. It's not exceptionally difficult to do better than Delta's demand modeling because they aren't going to pay a human analyst to look at every flight every day, but it's not something a novice can do. In general, June and July have low demand due to the southern winter, which is why you see more inventory.

If you want to use a round-trip fare component, purchase both flights when there is inventory at booking. If one-way fares look attractive, you can mix and match but only if you have flexibility in your return date given a fixed outbound. Waitlisting an upgrade certificate is a suckers' game and I recommend in the strongest terms never to do it unless you have no other choice.

Also consider returning to AKL and flying home AKL-LAX.

As noted above, it's just based on Z inventory bucket availability these days which is a revenue fare bucket and is fairly easy to search for or set alerts with ExpertFlyer and Google Flights. There's already a long existing thread here on using GUCs with post 2/1/22 changes -- https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delt...2-changes.html Note that there is also now a catch and you can only directly upgrade into D1 with a GUC from Premium Select fares if there is Premium Select cabin on the flight.

While there are currently no dates with Z bucket open on LAX-SYD flights in October, there are a bunch of dates in the opposite direction on SYD-LAX. The following is a search for 2 seats on SYD-LAX on Google Flights and the dates showing $9890 have at least 2 seats open in Z in order to come up with $9890 price for 2 seats (one-way Z fares on SYD-LAX are $4945 with 120 day advance purchase). As you can see, they are all currently Mon-Thu flights. So you are probably going to have to compromise and return on one of those days of the week. Since these fares have a 120 day advance purchase requirement, most September flights don't qualify at the point for those fares because they are too close in. The dates in September showing $11.2K are also Z fares (with 50 day advance purchase requirements), as are the Fri-Sun dates showing at $11.9K (Z fares for Fri-Sun departures are higher than Mon-Thu departures).

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...1a2d0783b5.png

Thats because June/July are miserable and cold in these destinations. I enjoy the reprieve of tourists on the north island during this time period. Of course you can find GUC availability, because its not a desirable time of year.