Hi there,

I'm Skywards silver flying now and then from Europe to Asia in Economy, enjoying upgrades to business when I can afford them using my skywards miles. In the past two years I upgraded four sectors without any problems even just a few days prior to departure . The sectors I upgraded were FRA-DXB, DXB-SIN, DXB-PEK and DXB-DUS.

On Aug, 13 I'm heading to KUL and wanted to upgrade DXB-KUL, but no luck. That's more than two weeks in advance.

Can someone shed some light on the availability of upgrades in general.

Cheers,
Adam

Adam,

Welcome to FT and the EK forum.

You can check award availability on www.seatcounter.com. Its semi-accurate, but should never be depended on.

Here's a screenshot of the 13 August.



Most airlines refer to Business Class by the codes C, J, D, Z or I.

The common thinking on this forum is that EK pull award inventory out of the "D" bucket, and you'll see by the screenshot that there are no D seats showing.

Doesn't mean that upgrades aren't available - it just means that for whatever reason, EK's Inventory Management (IM) system is holding them back.

I actually made a dummy booking and out of the 42 seats in business, 24 were showing already sold, with 18 available.



I think this might come down to the gate, but you then going to fall behind any Gold's who are wanting upgrades as well. In addition, expect EK to sell more seats between now and departure.

I'd keep calling if I was you. The golden rule to obtaining upgrades is to be persistent, especially with EK.

Good luck.

eightblack,

Thanks for your detailed investigation. I signed up with expert flyer. Is my understanding correct that I can usually instantly upgrade whatever flight having availability in D class?

I planned to spend 30,000 SPG points on an upgrade on the return flight. Anybody knows how long it takes to transfer SPG points to Skywards? How funny, if no more upgrades are available by the time the SPG points have finally been transferred.

Cheers,
Adam