Yes from LHR.

Funnily enough today's 9:10 flight had 7 upgrades available at check-in 24 hours ago, I choose the wrong date to travel!

Going forward I will buy a flex ticket (less miles to upgrade), but before I do I will check on flyertalk to see which flights have the upgrades and then pounce like there is no tomorrow!

Between the family we have 180,000 skyward miles between the 5 of us, they start to expire from mid 2016 to 2017, so want to use them up next year.

If there is unsold J inventory, then you can also try for an upgrade at Check-in.

Had my flight today...

No upgrades at check-in but was told if I flew yesterday I would have had an upgrade as the flight was empty.

You still have a lot of time. Always good to buy flex for the upgrade confo much before the date of flying.

I have a flex (2 tickets) to upgrade GVA to DXB next March, its quite stressful!

I wonder when I will get availability....

My experience in our part of the world since the changes to Skywards upgrades in July, is that most D bucket seats only become available 15 days before the flight, with much more limited availability from 15-45 days out.

My experience with trying to upgrade DEL-DXB tickets over the last few months has been the same. No D availability initially but Seats are released to the D pool 15 days before.

In the period from 15 days onwards, there is no discernable logic to their allocation of seats to the D bucket. Most of the time there is no allocation at all now of course, regardless of how few J seats they've sold, but if there are D bucket seats available on any of those days, there are always 7 of them.

In this time period they usually only seem to make D seats available about 1 day per week, and there is never any correlation with the number of unsold J seats. I've seen flights with 80% unsold J seats and nothing in the D bucket, while there are 7 D bucket seats in a 60% unsold cabin a day or 2 earlier or later.

Update.

Flying back this Tuesday to LHR at 4.15pm.

Just had a look and it appears there are 30 unsold seats and 5 blocked seats. Meaning there are 3 upgrades available at the moment, which could increase nearer to check-in.

Looks like when online check-in appears I have to do a mad rush to the airport to try and get the upgrade, or do I have to wait until I get to the airport on departure day?

Not sure how this works. 4 passengers are travelling but only 3 available so far. I think online upgrades are for all passengers. Would like miles to be deducted from every passenger.

Ignore me. Checked the wrong date haha.

8 seats available for purchase, 5 blocked and no upgrades available for EK30 on Tuesday.

Hope things change in time for check-in but I doubt it.

Ah! Again I was checking the wrong flight.

I was travelling on EK5 yesterday.

At 1pm, before check-in opens there were 23 unsold tickets including blocked seats.

I kindly asked the lady at check-in if there were upgrades available. She said only silver or gold members can upgrade, and that I should have upgraded 24 hours before.

I informed her that my ticket only allows me and my family an upgrade at check-in. She checked the facts again and then asked for all of our skyward cards, to my horror I learned from her that we can only upgrade if we have the physical skyward card with us.

1 passenger had theirs, the other left theirs at home and me and my brother have not been issued a card yet.

I tried persuading her to let all passengers upgrade as we have all the miles required, a lot of calls later and 15 minutes she said only the 1 passenger who has their physical skyward card with them can upgrade. At the end of the day only 1 person upgraded and they loved business class.

Until next year Dubai, I will be ready for an upgrade

That's weird.I would have thought that all your info would be there on their system. Were everyone travelling skywards members and if so did they have the skywards numbers with status on the etickets?. Was the status and skywards number printed on the boarding passes?

oh, that's really unfortunate! I thought so long as you had your skywards number in your booking, you should have been good. In all my years of flying, I've never been asked to show the card but from your experience, I'll remember to carry it along with me now.

If only you had read my post the other day on a different thread you may have been forewarned and forearmed ...http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/emira...l#post21712450

That's what I thought. It was all strange really.

To be honest it's not too bad.. Saved 7,500 airmiles for later use via flex ticket.

All passangers are blue skyward members, everything was already registered with skywards and numbers were printed on the etickets.

Yes skyward numbers were printed everywhere.