Seven ways to upgrade your ticket after you’ve booked and confirmed.
So you’ve booked your vacation and closed your laptop. Game over? No way.
If you booked using miles, you can still upgrade right up until flight time with the simple methods outlined below. The more time you can make use of, the more opportunities might appear that may not have been available at the time of booking.
Upgrade Means Improvement
To be clear, we define an “upgrade” as improving the cost, comfort, and/or convenience of your flight experience.
It might be moving up a cabin—the classic upgrade—or it might be improving your situation by saving more money or time, or by scoring a more desirable date or an itinerary with fewer stops. There is also the opportunity to get a better seat in the same class of service. You can take advantage of all this by knowing which programs offer better, currently available deals.
“Winners often succeed in the last five minutes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
THE 3 Cs OF UPGRADEABILITY
By continuing to keep your options open after you book and before you fly, you open yourself up to the 3 Cs of upgrade options: convenience, comfort, and cost.
Convenience Upgrades
There are three different types of convenience upgrades.
1. Route upgrade: You might be booked on a ticket that was not your first-choice destination. For example, you wanted to go to Bordeaux, France, but when you booked your ticket, the only mileage award space available was to a second-choice destination, say, Paris. But at a later date, closer to your departure, space opens up for a flight to Bordeaux.
2. Schedule upgrade: This type of upgrade comes in two varieties: connecting to a nonstop schedule and improving a schedule.
Imagine that when you booked your ticket, the only option available was a connecting flight to Tokyo, but at a later date, space opens up for a nonstop flight to Tokyo.
Or, for example, when you booked your ticket the only option available was a connection to Tokyo with possibly a forced overnight layover. At a later date, however, space opens up for a same-day connection.
3. Date upgrade: This comes up when the date you booked your flight for wasn’t your first-choice travel date. You may have wanted to arrive on October 20, but the only award space available at the time was October 22. And then later, after you booked, the airline opens up award space for the 20th. That’s still a better time for you, and by our definition, an upgrade.
Comfort Upgrades
There are two different types of comfort upgrades.
1. An airline upgrade in the same cabin: This means you are able to get a better seat, in the same cabin, but on a different airline.
Let’s say you book a ticket that was not on your first choice airline. For example, you wanted to travel New York-Frankfurt on Singapore Airlines in First Class. But when you booked your ticket, the only mileage award space available was on Lufthansa in First Class. And then at a later date, space opens up for Singapore Airlines in First Class.
2. Cabin upgrade: This means you’re able to get a better class of service, like going from Business Class to First, or even from Premium Economy to Business.
Cost Upgrades
There are two different types of cost upgrades.
1. Partner mileage cost upgrade: This means you’re able to get a lower mileage cost with a mileage partner program.
For example, you could book using American miles on a ticket from New York to Barcelona for 115,000 AA miles. But you’d like to get a lower mileage award ticket by using Japan Airlines, an AA partner, for 63,000 miles.
So why not book your original ticket with Japan Airlines (JAL) miles? Two reasons:
- You might not have any JAL miles in your account and need time to transfer points to JAL, and/or
- At the time of booking your ticket, partner award space was not available when using JAL miles.
So, you booked using AA miles to have a ticket confirmed, but after your points are transferred and posted to your JAL mileage account you can now book with JAL miles, and/or partner award space opens up with American for using JAL miles at a later date.
2. Low-cost upgrade: An example of this type of upgrade is being booked on an anytime/everyday/standard (airlines have different names for this) ticket. It can often be double the price of a low-cost mileage award. And then at a later date, space opens up for that low-cost mileage award. Time to pounce.
HOW MUCH DO THESE KINDS OF UPGRADES / IMPROVEMENTS COST?
As you might expect, there can be a cost involved with overtime upgrades.
The seven different overtime upgrades detailed above all involve different processes, so they will vary by airline, by elite status level, by when changes are made, and by cost, ranging from no fees to $200. (Look for a detailed report on award change fees for major airlines coming soon.)
Of course, there is a time cost, too. I often spend five or ten minutes a day searching for overtime upgrades for various trips I have booked.
The amount of time I spend trying to upgrade my current bookings usually depends on how happy/unhappy I am with the original booking I had to make.
What’s your approach like to improving tickets you’ve already booked?