Top Platinum - What to expect
 

Hi All,
I was able to use a short El Al status match from AA EXP to El Al TPL...
I have a flight to HKG in a couple of week, I will probably take El Al for that.
What should I expect?
Any chances for upgrades?
Any chance my colleague travelling with me choose economy plus seats?

I was LY Gold a few years ago and remember getting upgraded a lot, is this still the case?

Thanks...

Congratulations on the status match.
If you fly economy you will have a hard time retaining the status.
If you and colleague are on the same reservation you both get economy plus.
Upgrades are only if they have over booking in economy. If that happens you will be on the top of the list.
You can also go to the F part of the KDL lounge.

Has this changed recently?
Even as PL I got almost 100% upgrades regardless of Y capacity.
As TPL I would guess u will be at 100% or very close to it.

If you book Y,S,M you get upgraded regardless of Y capacity.

Did you get frequent upgrades from lower booking classes?

Correct! forgot that part :)
I was on S always.
BUT i was also upgraded from T class and even from award tickets on some occasions.

That has never been the upgrade policy with LY.

LY has or have an official policy to upgrade elites who are not booked in Y/S/M?

As a TP, my upgrade rate from Y/S/M to Business is around 50% flying mostly TLV-NYC.
Been doing this for over a decade and have had maybe 2 or 3 op-ups - nothing impressive.
LY policy is to upgrade status pax with the right type of tkt based on availability in F and C, not based on overbooking in Y. The only way an F or C seat remains unoccupied is if there is nobody eligible for the upgrade.

The OP never mentioned anything about their fare class.

In the good old days when Gold was the top tier and there were no fare restrictions in terms of upgrades, I believe I had an upgrade success rate of around 80%.

Thanks everyone for the answers.
I am currently on low classes (H,O)
The office is paying for the tickets and I don't mind paying extra for the higher class but because I am travelling with a colleague I don't know if I should...
Any chance that we will both be upgraded if only I have S fare?

Regarding keeping the status, I have a lot of travel scheduled and usually have options for Business but I think that keeping the status will be hard even when flying C, I might just try to get Gold for another year unless LY really surprises me...

I can get AA top status with 4 C flights to the US while with LY it doesn't even get me gold... really don't get it, with BA it's something like 2.5 if you plan it correctly...

Regarding this specific point, it's always been much harder to get status on LY than on competitors. The idea is "exclusivity," and in some respects, the soft-treatment is indeed better for LY elites than elites on some competitors, but the product officially offered is really no better.

For example, flying TLV-NYC on UA 9 times (one-way) in regular Y fares gets you UA Gold (*G). Doing that on LY, not on basic fares but not on Y/S/M fares, gets you 720 points, not even enough points for silver in the new system (because you get Silver with 700 points + 12 segments, or 800 points in general). And certainly not Gold!

Just how LY, for whatever reason, structures their program.

This is exactly the reason why I am trying El Al for the first 2 flights of the year, I have a busy schedule flying for the first 6 months already (Although tickets are only ordered a week or 2 in Advance) So I decided to check them in a couple of flights (Long and short haul) and see if it's worth even getting to Gold, which should not be too hard for me...
As I said, back when I was gold I got much more then expected, I want to see if it's still the same...
Let's see, I will post my thoughts here late Feb, When I am back from the 2 return flights...

How many years ago were you Gold? Was it the top tier then, or had Platinum and Top Platinum been introduced?

2009-2011, I think Platinum existed, but not TP, not 100% sure...

i remember buying $700 youth fare economy tickets to BKK or HKG , using a 300 point voucher to upgrade to Business , and then getting upgraded to First at the airport as a GL