F seat with Prestige?
 

Flying from Europe to NZ over ICN in October/November. There in paid J, back in Y with a 20hr layover in Seoul.

I have a few questions:
- On the way out LHR -ICN is on an older 773 with the prestige sleeper and 8 F seats. They seems unavailable/occupied when selecting a seat and ExpertFlyer shows them as blocked. Will the be available sometime before the flight? I am STE+ as FB Gold if that helps.
- The leg to AKL is also a sleeper, any recommendations wrt the seat choice for best sleep?
- On the way back I have a layover 1800-1400 the next day. I would like to go into the city center and have a hotel there. Will they be able to check through my luggage so I don't have to worry about it?

I could be wrong, but since COVID started, i thought KE only makes the F seats available via cash booking (the notable exception may be the ATL-ICN route that someone here noticed was available via Award booking). Also I thought they'd only "upgrade" their KE elite members or whatever they call it.

This also happens with CZ pre-pandemic, all of the narrowbody featuring a PE cabin will operate as a standard Y cabin and will be blocked unless they can't fill up people all in Y. I would always ask for it during check-in in CZ hubs or just go onboard and ask the flight attendant for me to switch seats to the PE cabin, the FA always doesn't mind me seating at the PE cabin, considering CZ's horrible J product on narrowbodies, and the low load factor at the PE cabin, the experience is often similar. It's like Club Europe with extra legroom(35-37 inches) with standard Y service.

IME if flight loads necessitate the use of FC seats for business class passengers, KE will assign such seats *only* to their own (KE) elites, not elites in close SkyTeam member partner programs. These good seats will be blocked and you may find yourself moved to a middle seat in a 2-3-2 configuration, despite having reserved a nice aisle or window seat for yourself in advance, and KE will refuse to move you to a better seat.

Is it possible to speak to one of the FA onboard and try to do a self-upgrade if they remain empty? They are technically still business class seats.

If you are referring to my post, it's actually for a paid prestige class seat (so not an award booking). In short, my company paid for a prestige class seat for me (cost was roughly $7k USD) and my assigned seat on ICN->ATL is what appears to be a F seat. Coming back to ICN, my flight is out of JFK and my understanding is that they still sell F tickets with F service. FWIW, I have a regular prestige seat assigned for my return flight.

They meant me haha. Because now KE sells F paid AND award space on their website again for ICN-ATL and reverse. They used to not sell F class and would do the automatic bump up like you have on ICN-ATL. So, in your case - F hasn't re-started by your flight date.

I was hoping to get such an automatic bump-up to F as well. But given the message above, I now fear that my window seat will taken away and I end up in a middle seat in 2-3-2. Very strange on what for most airlines is a high profile route to LHR...

10 days out only 4 seats (all middle seats) are empty in the seat map and the flight is zeroed out for weeks now in terms of availability.

Is there anyone with recent experience being re-located from a window seat to a middle seat in 2-3-2?