Upgrade strategy for a flight 9 months away
 

Hi all,
i am a 1K looking to use GPU’s to upgrade 2 tickets from PHX - NRT. There is a V class fare available today that I am considering buying. My 3 questions are:
1) Is it better to wait for PZ availability? If PZ does open up after I buy the tickets do I get upgraded automatically?
2) Will it make a material difference to buy upto Q in terms of upgrade availability? Approximately $400 more per ticket.
3) how much of a factor is buying this early? Should I wait for the fare to fall into the W bucket.

Thanks everyone!

1) Yes. In theory, yes, although the implementation is pretty lousy and often fails.
2) No. If you're going to buy up, buy up to discount business.
3) Buying early is dumb money; the smart money buys when/where PZ is available.

You're lucky they're offering the V. Often they don't offer below an H or a Q to NRT.

Buying nine months out and just hoping the upgrade will clear is not a great strategy.

I think there are two questions really embedded here:

Is it better to book a confirmed confirmed upgrade, or do I have a good chance waitlisting early? The former, a million times the former. W/V fares do not change significantly over time, so you have almost nothing to lose waiting and monitoring inventory over the next six months. However, if you must fly on a specific date and routing, then this is not really helpful. The realistic answer in this case is that you will not get upgraded.

For a given flight, do I have a chance of being "skipped" by someone who snags open PZ space later? You are not supposed to -- the majority of the time you will automatically be cleared into PZ when it opens, according to the waitlist priority. There is sometimes a several hour window where someone could "steal" the upgrade, but it is exceedingly rare for this to be taken advantage of many months out, and you yourself can take the space manually if you see it, so waitlisting the upgrade is the strictly better approach.

No.

Almost nil. The window where only some 1Ks on Q/V/W fares clear upgrades is extremely small. The vast majority of the time, either PZ space will float, meaning the entire upgrade list has been run regardless of status, or (more common) nobody will get upgrades except maybe a couple of GS at the gate, to take the no-show's seats.

When the price may be twice as much? Even if it never happens? You buy when the price looks good (subjective), and the earlier you get on the upgrade waitlist, the better off you are. It also really depends on how firm your dates are.

The price won't be twice as much, though. As findark pointed out, the prices for W/V fares rarely move much, if at all, and unless you're traveling during a peak period, it's likely that you'll have W availability much closer in.

The best approach, by far, is to monitor for PZ availability and book if/when it occurs; that keeps you from having to guess where it will open. PHX-NRT can be sanely routed via LAX, SFO, and DEN; buying a ticket now locks you into one of the three, essentially cutting your upgrade chances by two-thirds.

For W/V fares, I wouldn't start to worry about missing the boat on price until a minimum of 6 weeks prior to departure.

Note: OP -- to look for PZ space, make sure you're searching LAX-NRT, SFO-NRT, DEN-NRT, etc. Don't just look at PHX-NRT. It's a lot more common to find upgrade space in advance on long-haul flights than short-haul domestic flights. If you search PHX-NRT, you only see PZ > 0 if it's available all the way through. I'm guessing you'd be willing to manage PHX-LAX in coach if it meant you could upgrade LAX-NRT immediately, though. :)

If you're flexible, NRT is not a difficult destination for which to get an upgrade. If you're not flexible, I agree.

(Here, flexible means different connection points and possibly different days of the week. It's a lot easier to upgrade a Tuesday flight than a Friday flight).

Troll be gone.

The Polaris lounge and seats don't do you any good if your upgrade doesn't clear. The lounge also doesn't do you any good if your upgrade happens to clear at the gate.

The Polaris lounge at LAX is now open. DEN, not so much.

The cheapest PHX-NRT fares require a 14-day minimum stay. I'm guessing your trip is shorter than that?

Well you really can't assess upgrade odds on any particular flight this far in advance. What are your travel days? Saturday/Sunday are very difficult both directions.

I personally would not buy blind and waitlist. I would wait and watch the flights from LAX and DEN as well as SFO for PZ. As jsloan notes, the SFO routing does you no good if your upgrade doesn't clear. Also, the 77W is your worst option in Y. If you're set on buying now, you might consider buying PE, as that will put you ahead of all Y pax on the upgrade list.

You might also keep in mind that the SFO Polaris lounge is the weakest in the system. From all reports, LAX is better. And for two pax traveling together, the 789 is not a bad choice (though I far prefer the 77W as a solo traveler).

Is this price drop the result of lower fare buckets opening up (e.g. W), or a decrease in the Q fare? I'd certainly expect the former--IME it's rare for a Q fare to drop by $400 or 25% at once--in which case, the advice above holds: sit quietly and monitor PZ availability on the routes/dates of interest until two months out or even closer in.

If your travel plans aren't flexible, then buying early is usually the best deal. Looking at flight status of the same flight over the next days (like, 3 days out) can give you an idea of how full they get -- if they're basically full a few days out, your chances of upgrading might be quite small.
If you do waitlist, then the fare class does make a (small) difference. Buying a W fare you often won't get the upgrade (especially if you fly through SFO). However, even with the higher fare you still may not get it if it's heavily booked, or there are global service members who are waitlisted. So, it could be more money you're throwing out the window (already you're throwing money out the window by booking a W fare!)
The "upgrade sniping" described in the thread happens, and I've lost a few waitlisted upgrades to snipers, but it is not the norm. Usually, waitlists do clear as they're supposed to.

This is not true. The best time to buy a flight changes, but is generally somewhere between 100 days and 3 weeks before departure. UA (and other airlines) often don't open discount inventory until they see how sales trends look.

There's no hard and fast rule for the best time to buy airfare; if there were, the airlines would adjust their sales practices to eliminate it.

This tells you little, for a number of reasons; seasonality and day of week are highly impactful on your upgrade chances -- and there's no way to distinguish between a flight that's full of upgraders and a flight that's full of paid passengers. They both just look full. :)

What you can do is to use the inventory information that UA makes available; look at expert mode (just for SFO-NRT, LAX-NRT, etc., not for PHX-NRT) and check the inventory buckets. PZ > 0 is needed to upgrade. However, if PZ=0, you want the flight with the inventory that's "closest." The bucket order is J JN C D Z ZN P PN PZ IN I. If you can't find PZ > 0, and you're intent upon waitlisting, look for PN > 0. If no PN > 0, look for P > 0, etc. The further away from PZ you get, the fewer discount tickets UA is selling. Having discount tickets available for sale is a positive indicator that upgrade space may come. (The converse is not necessarily true for a flight this far in the future; UA has started treating J inventory the same way it treats Y inventory, holding prices high far in advance to see if they get any takers).

Not in this case. W is the lowest fare class published in the PHX-TYO market -- and even that requires a two-week stay that the OP likely doesn't have, since the original discussion was about Q and V fares. Fares in and out of Tokyo are much higher than much of the rest of Asia.