On a recent trip my return flight was in the evening. I was tracking availability and status the day before, and EF showed All Economy 0 and All Business 7. No First on this sector. So it looked as if Economy might get overbooked, and I reckoned my chances at 50-50 for an OpUp with my Gold status.

Morning of travel, my Economy pre-booked seat number disappeared from MMB. So I figured demand must be huge for Economy and hopeless for Business - why else would they OpUp 12 hours before flight time.

I checked MMB again at T-3, and my original seat had reappeared, EF showed all Business 0 and Economy 1.

In the lounge or On board, no business seats were available for upgrade.

Now I get that one of two things happened.

1. Lots of last minute Business customers turned up, or
2. Several Economy cancellations and I didn't make the cut for an OpUp. But that is unlikely since Business went full and I did see few others trying to upgrade with miles in the lounge and told it was full.

Be that as it may, and airlines do work in mysterious ways. But isn't it unusual that my seat number disappeared at T-12? Why would they start processing OpUps so early?

On heavily oversold flights they do that. Though all that comes to naught if a large group of Y pax fail to show up...

Maybe Y oversold so no seat available and no space in business so they offloaded a previously checked in non status passenger to give you a seat.

Something similar happened during a long layover in the DXB lounge. My connecting flight was full in Y and my seat number had disappeared. I was very happy and was waiting for the beep at the gate ( and for them to re print my boarding pass to J)

Sadly nothing happened and I was not opped up.

I don't check anymore and if I get an op up I just take it as a pleasant surprise .


PS: I did post about this incident which happened last year and some of the posters commented that I should have asked for a fresh boarding pass in the lounge itself. I'm not sure if that would have made a difference.

I had a flight in mid jan to LHR. As I seem to be doing way to much now, I was sitting in the lounge refreshing the mobile website looking at my booking and then bam seat went to none, big smile refreshed a few times still blank, went to gate, no beep for new boarding pass.

Got onto plane - it was EMPTY! No idea why my seat changed to empty.

But Ended up having a full row of 4 to myself and as I only wanted to sleep was kind of like an upgrade - seat was longer than even first class

I had a similar incident in DXB on my last trip where I had a wait of almost 6 hours and noticed in BOM itself that the seat for my onward connection from DXB had gone to None. I went up to the F lounge attendant at DXB and requested for a new BP. They just commented that they couldn't view my seat. I waited for an hour and then as the shift changed, went up again to request a new BP. Again, they said that they couldn't view my new seat. Fortunately, when I went up to the gate I got an upgrade.

So my sense it that there might be a situation where they might have put you on a list for an op-up but not actually assigned you a seat in J, until last minute. Just a theory....

you should all get the mobile boarding pass.

I clicked refresh on that in the lounge and watched it change from y to j on my recent Y trip to IST for both legs. Happened about t-45 and I then got new BP's printed.

Forget MMB that's not that reliable as we all can confirm.

I've never used a mobile boarding pass. Can you have both mobile and paper boarding passes. The other issue is that mobile boarding passes are not accepted @DEL as everyone at the airport wants to put their stamp on it.

At Indian airports its pretty much out of question. But even at JFK, I've not been able to get a mobile BP, maybe because my final destination in India?

Didn't know you could do that. Thanks for the tip...

I always do online check in and then get the bp by mobile. I then check in and get a boarding pass. I use the mobile bp just to check for op ups. It's literally real time!

Pretty cool.

I did this on the outward leg of my current trip M3RED and it worked well (thanks for the tip). Was in the F lounge at DXB, saw that the opup had come through and then went and got a new pass.

I continued on to DEL and as jackiedada states, this is not available in India, so you just have to wait and (hopefully) get surprised at the gate

You can still do it through the website, but don't do it through Manage A Booking.

Go to "Check In" again, even though you have already checked in. I can't remember the exact sequence, but as you progress through this you'll see your seat number and it will disappear if/when the upgrade happens.

This must be almost immediate as I entered the lounge in DXB a few months ago - no mention of upgrade. Within a few minutes I powered up my laptop and saw the changed seat info so headed back to the entrance and picked up a new Boarding Pass.

Or you can set up an Expertflyer alert for your already booked seat number. When they clear the seat to assign you a new one, it remains open for a brief moment until reassigned and Expertflyer will email you an alert notification. Works for me every time!

That's a lot of effort though but an option where mobile bp isn't available.