A couple of reader questions about upgrades.

JC said,

Hi there! Love the insights you share.

I know award ticketing requires of me a lot of foresight and planning, but what would really make a difference on my end is how to most efficiently book award tickets/upgrades on the web.

And Joy asked,

For Star Alliance or Oneworld, what’s the cheapest way to upgrade an Economy flight booked into a cheap fare class (like K or L)? It seems quite expensive on United, for instance, because you have to pay some $300 in addition to the miles you use. Can you do it with a partner airline’s miles for cheaper?

Conventional wisdom has always said that the best way to use miles was confirmed international upgrades to business class (buying a coach ticket, using miles to upgrade).

That used to be true: you would accrue miles for the paid travel, earn status, spend fewer miles.

Sadly that’s no longer nearly as good a value proposition as it used to be because upgrades have gotten harder and more expensive — at a time when ‘free’ award tickets have become more flexible. International premium cabin awards are now in most cases a much better deal than upgrades.

• Cash co-pays are often required. When you buy the cheapest ticket on United or American, you can’t just use your miles to pay for an upgrade. Assuming you aren’t on a full fare ticket you are going to have to pay a cash “co-pay” as well that can be more than $500 per person each way — so it’s $1,000+ extra cash for the privilege of using your miles to upgrade.

• Not all fares may be upgradable. Delta requires you to buy an “M” fare or higher to be eligible to use your miles to upgrade. That’s often about as expensive as a discounted advance purchase ticket. If you cannot confirm the upgrade at booking, you may have to spend substantially more for the ticket (M fare rather than cheapest coach) for the chance of an upgrade. You’re spending a lot of money to bet on the roulette wheel that you’re going to land on green for an upgrade. You could be significantly out of pocket and your upgrade doesn’t even clear.

• Full fares are usually necessary to upgrade on partners. Although it’s increasingly possible to use one program’s miles to upgrade on an airline partner’s flights, that generally means buying a full or nearly full fare coach ticket — again, about as expensive as an advance purchase, discount business-class ticket in the first place.


• Upgrade availabiltiy is harder to get these days. Airlines are holding back upgrade inventory more than they used to, both a product of full flights and also changing revenue management philosophy that tries to squeeze out maximum revenue from each flight (fair, but not helpful for upgraders). Because the upgrade list is generally sorted by status, waitlisting for an upgrade usually means non-status passengers wind up in back.

At the same time it has become much easier to book alliance and partner award tickets. The growth of airline alliances has made it simpler to mix and match partner airlines on a single award ticket. That opens up more combinations of flights for redeeming miles to get where you want to go.

In other words, partner and alliance awards are much more seamless than partner and alliance upgrades.

There are exceptions, of course. Upgrading from premium economy to business class on British Airways can be done for very few miles (half the miles of a coach award ticket for the same segment) and no cash co-pay. If it’s available, it’s a great value.

And when your company is buying your ticket, upgrades are a useful tool.

So it’s worth paying attention to how upgrades work. In general it’s much easier to use an airline’s own miles to upgrade on that airline, rather than trying to upgrade on partners. Star Alliance has the most advanced upgrade options, though not all airlines are going to be possible, and usually the upgrades are coming out of the same inventory as awards. As mentioned, you need to be on a Y or B (basically full fare) ticket. And each award is generally good only for a single segment.

United is pretty good (within their IT limitations) about processing upgrades online. American doesn’t offer that option — either on its own flights, or on joint venture partners British Airways or Iberia. You can generally only upgrade one cabin, which means that a coach ticket on British Airways that American issues can only be upgraded with AAdvantage miles to premium economy.

Most readers — those that do not have United’s global premier upgrades or American’s VIP upgrades which in each case are given to top tier elites and can be used without co-pay on less than full fare tickets (in American’s case, currently, on any fare) — are going to be better off searching for award tickets than buying paid coach international travel and upgrading.

---

You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. Don’t miss out!