BronzedAussie

Im booked on QF63 SYD-JNB on the 29/8 and when I look at www.expertflyer.com there are only two business class seats sold and no first class seats sold. I rang qantas and tried to upgrade but was told there were no upgrade seats available. Sooooo, how long will qantas wait before they release the seats into upgrade inventory ???

Not that it matters too much as post May 25 it will actually cost me 52,000 points to upgrade rather than the 70,000 required at the moment

NM

Upgrade bucket is the same as award redemption bucket (for the time being, all changes May 25th). Also note that the seat maps only show the seats that have been allocated, and that is not necessarily the same as the number of seats sold.

Upgrade/Award seats are usually loaded into the system for QF FF members up to 355 days ahead. Once they are gone, they tend not to revisit the allocation until fairly close to flight date.

In my experience, they teand to review about 14 days ahead, again about 7 days ahead, and then again at 3 days and 1 day. Of course this depends on where the flight falls with regards to times and weekends.

But after Mat 25th, upgrades no longer come out of U inventory and all upgrade requests will be waitlisted and processes on the day of the flight. Hopefully this will mean more last minute award seats as the U won't all go to upgrades, and hopefully will also mean more upgrades with less empty J cabins as remaining seats go to upgrades.

Aisle Seat H

And what would your guess be about op. up's NM ? Is the post May system likely to result in more or less of them, espec. for WPs, or will we just have to wait and see ?

BronzedAussie

So the system becomes more aligned to status as instead of just ringing and enquiring as to upgrade availability and being allocated, you go on a waitlist with seats then being allocated 3hrs prior to flight time on a status basis. Which will mean that Elites will get more upgrades and your average joe never can upgrade except on the rare occurrence that no Elites are flying on that plane or if they are have already purchased J or F tickets.

serfty

For fully or overbooked flights, it could possibly mean there will be less Operational Upgrades. Why give a free trip to the front when someone has indicated they are prepared to use points.

So the spare J/F seats would go firstly to those who have requested upgrades before any OPUPS for the remainder are considered.

Kiwi Flyer

The other factor to consider is psychological one. Lack of confirmation until close to departure may mean more paid J or F tickets (by those who dont want to take a chance of ending in Y), which presumably is just what QF wants.

ThePope

And of course with most of the point costs of the upgrades increasing, and no upgrades from Red-eDeals etc, there will be less competition for upgrades... regular corporate rate flyers should do well. SFSCs might miss out on the status induced Opups.

NM

Well, for me it can't get any less. I have not had an international Op Up for about 8 years! And most of my travel now is international paid D fares. I guess its a bit hard to expect an OpUp on two-class aircraft when flying J, but I have also had a lot of J on 3-class aircraft.

Have not had one on domestic in almost as long. But not sure if that is due to ODU policy or otherwise. I think we will just have to wait and see how the whole upgrade process pans out in the end.

Wongo

I think if you was flying CX or SQ on J in a regular periods. Your chance of op-upgrade is so much better. Thats my gut feeling anyway.
ok, if QF didn't even op-up for Aus-NZ in a full flight, it is just wrong.

everywhere

SQ op-up ?

Dave Noble

I think that nearly all airlines that offer multi class service , involuntarily upgrade people when necessary from time to time. With decent yield management, the number of times should be low.

Dave