Good evening,

Does anyone have a phone number leading to a Star Alliance person that can help me navigate the upgrade morass between UA and Turkish?
United tells me the flight I am interested in is not open to upgrade with miles (yes, my ticket is of an upgradable category), Turkish tells me the flight is wide open and to call Star Alliance...I have never been so frustrated dealing with miles upgrades as I have progressively been over the last 4 weeks.
Any help, suggestion, idea, thought would be so very much appreciated!!!

Many thanks!

did you try using .bomb to try to upgrade your flight?

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/app...rdUpgrade.aspx

YES, multiple times. I also speak to UA agents almost with the same frequency...I also called Turkish to no avail...
Hence my original question.

Sounds incredibly frustrating.

When calling UA, do you ask to be connected to the "star alliance desk"?

The inventory that Turkish has is most likely different than what UA has available to them.

And that is precisely the issue. UA's *A desk maintains that this sort of upgrade can only be done through the *A mechanism (i.e., the dedicated link that one can go to from the Mileaga Plus website), that they see from their end what I see when I try to get an upgrade myself (i.e, a message that the flight is unavailable for upgrades) and that there is no way for me (a passenger) to get to speak to a *A person.
Turkish reservations tell me that the flight is wide open for upgrades (I also see that there are plenty of available seats through any search engine like expedia) and that it is a *A problem that I can't see from my end that the flight is open for upgrades...
According to UA I cannot do this sort of upgrade when I am at the airport checking in, so what do i do?

Try calling UA during normal business hours and asking for the Star Alliance desk.

As I indicated, that is what I have been doing for the last 4 weeks.

It's possible that Turkish is seeing upgrades available for its own members, not UA or other *A programs. *A upgrades come out of regular award inventory, so if you can find a business seat available for redemption on that flight, you should be able to upgrade; if not, you can't. Seats available for purchase through Expedia or elsewhere is irrelevant.

And given that the current scarcity of TK award seats to/from the US, this is likely the answer. The calendar got pretty much scraped clean after UA announced the devaluation.

So, I took the "fish or cut bait" approach: I cancelled the TK ticket (fully refundable) and bought a new ticket using 2 other *A airlines. After a month of frustration I ended up paying just $300 more (over the original price of a B class economy ticket) to get a business class ticket: no heartache, no worries...
You learn something new every day...and one of my lessons is to not book TK again expecting to upgrade using *A miles.

Many thanks to all for your help.

It's not unique to TK: for most airlines, a discounted business class ticket will be cheaper than or similar to a full-fare economy ticket that's eligible for *A upgrade. The whole *A upgrade thing is a gimmick, IMO.