Where’s my upgrade?” Why more fliers with miles and status get stuck in coach

“While airlines like to promote free tickets with their mileage programs, the award that many even semi-regular clients want is an upgrade… These are the very awards that are getting harder to get…

At a time when flying has increasingly become an ordeal, an upgrade can often make the difference between a very pleasant and a miserable, cramped experience….

Personally, give me a good book and an occasional glass of wine and I find flying in business class a mini-vacation…

These days, I have had clients waitlist 10 months in advance with no luck. Even elite fliers with 100,000 mile a year haven’t been upgraded on flights with over 40 business class seats left at the time of booking. Especially on transatlantic and transpacific flights.

Now this doesn’t mean upgrades never happen. But they’re a lot harder to count on getting. So what’s happened?

As with many factors that make the flying experience more unpleasant there are several reasons.

For starters, airlines are now selling more and more discount business class seats. These fares are often highly restrictive — 50 days out, nonrefundable, change fees of $500 or more — but they are relatively cheap, often less than half the full business class fare.

Which means compared to the “old days” when there was only one business class fare, a lot more people are opting to pay up front.

In addition, waitlist priorities are getting more sophisticated. The new computer waitlist algorithms don’t favor the occasional traveler, to put it mildly.

For example, a passenger decides in June that they plan to go to Paris the following April. While most of the business class seats are available, upgrades are sold out, so they book a coach seat and buy their ticket and waitlist for an upgrade.

But being first on the upgrade list at the beginning often doesn’t mean anything. Increasingly, airlines like to wait to see if they can sell those premium seats.

And at any time, even if it’s only a week prior to departure, if an elite flier with a higher status decides they want to try to book and upgrade the same flight, that elite passenger jumps ahead on the waitlist.

Considering that basic elite status with most carriers is only about 25,000 miles, this means that the traveler who accumulates miles usually just by credit card is out of luck.

Finally those credit cards are a double-edged sword. Yes, they give out a ton of miles, along with the shopping promotions, cellphone promotions, even home mortgage promotions. Basically, if you can think of a way to spend money there’s a way to get bonus miles doing it. That’s the good news. The bad news — there’s a whole lot of other people doing the same thing. ” ( via consumertraveler.com ) by JANICE HOUGH

Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to read more about – where’s my upgrade?” Why more fliers with miles and status get stuck in coach