Reader Trey, occasional flyer but frequent upgrader, sings the praises of American Airlines’ upgrades for purchase at check-in and asks:
I travel with relative infrequency, say 3-4 times per year. When I do, I /always/ fly American Airlines because I like their planes, I like their service, and, usually, I like their price. The latest factor keeping my business with them, however, is the availability of $30 500mi upgrades when using Kiosk Check-In. I LOVE it. It’s cheap, fast, and the only way I’ll ever qualify to upgrade from the N or Q class fare I normally book. My question is this: is there any online tool which will let me view historical loads so that I can book flights which normally have room left up front?
The upgrades-for-purchase at check-in can be a decent deal, especially if you’re on a super-cheapo ticket. To maximize your odds of being able to buy one, you want to be on flights with 1) lots of tickets for sale in first class (which is hard to predict, but you can see tickets for sale up until a few hours before the flight) AND 2) with the fewest possible number of top-tier elites on board. These elites might be automatically upgraded by the airline, so they’d jump ahead of you, Trey. But unless you work for the airline, there’s no way to know who’s booked on a flight, though you can expect super-elites to travel to business destinations from main hubs, say, Dallas-New York.
I’m afraid I don’t know of any online service that offers reliable historical information about how many actual seats were available for upgrades into first class. The closest thing out there is UpgradeSuccess.com, which I’ve mentioned here, but the information in their database is pretty thin.
Other sites like ExpertFlyer let you subscribe and see loads for FUTURE flights, but that doesn’t tell you how these flights filled up in the past. FareCast collects this sort of information and gathers it in their database to make predictions about future fares, but again, this isn’t necessarily data that would help you in picking an easily-upgradable flight.
But maybe I’m missing something: Someone out there will surely correct me if I’m wrong. Any ideas?
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September 30th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Well you may be underestimating the power of ExpertFlyer. I use it almost every time I fly American in order to see not only what the loads are but what the actual upgrade availabilty inventories are. Even AA.com doesn’t show you that. Knowing what happened in the past isnt’ going to help you one bit in determining what’s going to happen on your flight, say, a month for now. The thing about ExpertFlyer, is that they show you the X inventory, in real time, which is the inventory that the 500-mile sticker upgrades pull from. This way you can see (up to 100 hours before the flight time) the inventory and call up AA when they become available.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Is this “upgrades-for-purchase at check-in” option only with American Airlines? If it is something that works with other airlines, does it have to be done at a kiosk or can one go directly to the counter agent?
December 7th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
lk:
Most U.S. airlines offer an option to buy upgrades at check-in — subject to availability, of course. On United, for example, I have even gotten the offer to upgrade on international tickets which I “bought” with frequent flyer miles. (For example, $550 for a one-way upgrade from economy to business ORD-AMS.)
The kiosk or the online-check-in *may* offer it. You can always ask at the counter, too.