Bonus trips can now be upgraded for points. Nice
 

There are at least a couple of us FT'ers that have been able to upgrade TATL bonus trips with points. I always have asked, and was always told that the system didn't allow upgrading booking class x.

On my trip ORD-CPH I was upgraded to Plus with Optiontown, but OT wouldn't upgrade my daughter who had booking class x.

I told my daughter that I'll try to get her an OpUp or upgrade for points, but that there wasn't good prospects for us to get to sit together. Before I could even ask at check-in if I could upgrade her, the service rep suggested that I upgrade her for points.

I was so surprised by this, that I think I said something like, "You can't do that." But the rep said that I could, so I did. And then she gave us both an OpUp to business. Nice :p

She wrote on the old boarding pass my EB number and upgraded for 15000 points, and asked me to sign. The points were taken out of my account total the next day, but it took 4 days for the transaction line to appear. That was a little weird.

All in all I think that this was one of the best things EB did last year.

Is this now a confirmed rule? The T&C still say it can't be done but to be honest I never had any issues upgrading me and my girlfrind traveling on an award ticket at the gate uses points in the last two years.

What they never did and probably still won't do:

1) Upgrade a award ticket via OT, as this would result in Point/Mile earnings and you would get back quite a nice percentage of the miles you paied for the trip.
2) Offer a confirmed upgrade through the SAS Website upfront

I think it is a pretty smart way to get people to spend a lot of points and reduce the huge amount of points collected by their customers. I spent at least 200k points (5x40k) just on TATL Go to C upgrades. Costs the airline not much compared to my CPH->NRT->CPH award in I for 140.000 (which I got for 70k by AMEX)

As said, worked for me before. Probably depends on the gate or check-in agent. The SAS website stills shows it is not possible:

http://www.flysas.com/en/EuroBonus/E...nts/All-seats/