Haven't a clue.....
 

...."Well that's me stuffed then - always hand baggage, online check in - no opportunity to make the right impression..."

Must admit that some of mine pre-dated on-line chk-in. On returns from overseas I usually check-in in person as on-line doesn't work everywhere yet.

s'pose you could add a few smilies when loading your contact e-mail or mobile no.??:D

the wife and i always do ok by upgrades... mind you it helps as she works in the industry ( security supervisor ) and i used to work on the ramp ( push backs / loading etc ). although saying that it would appear to us that american carriers seem to appreiciate the people on the ground as we have only once been upgraded on a uk carrier, and that was for our honeymoon... ( head girl-cabin crew )

Upgrades
 

The only time I would dream about inquiring about an upgrade is on the carrier that I have Gold status with, and it usually is just a casual, "Is the front full today?" Occasionally I'll get a bump up, but the route I typically fly with them usually has several VIPs and a couple of FAMs, so chances usually are slim.

I recently was stopped as I boarded one of their mileage plan partner's aircraft at NRT, and was given a new boarding pass for Business Class upstairs. I never heard an oversold announcement, so was very surprised. Actually, I was so exhausted by that point, I nearly wept at the treat.

The only time I have asked for an upgrade at check-in, I received it; Booked on a Milwaukee-Newark-Heathrow return home with Continental and BA, I received an SMS from BA in the early hours of the morning on the day of flight to say the Newark-Heathrow flight had been cancelled.

With WiFi in my hotel room to find the BA international reservations number, within minutes I was booked on the next BA flight from Newark to Heathrow but arrived in Newark to find a rugby scrum (and then some) of irate passengers.

Using the fast queue as my luggage was checked through I made the reasonable and true request "although I'm not the only one who has been delayed, the delay does mean I will get off the flight and walk straight in to a business meeting with no time to prepare; please can I have a seat where I can easily work?".

I was upgraded from economy (WT) to business (Club) without even a bat of the eyelid and reminded that this meant I could use the lounge to work before the flight too.

Good service BA, both the SMS and the upgrade, even if the rumour was that the cancellation was to combine "2 in to 1".

It was BA who really looked after me a couple of christmas' ago. I had worked an early shift at MAN (0500-1330) jumped on the 1415 to LHR ran around LHR like a fool trying to get a seat out to JFK. Everyone could offer me Newark, but it had to be JFK as I was meeting Mr Lexx who was coming in from YVR. Luckily BA took pity on me and onloaded me straight away, grateful, I was almost kissing their feet by this point. I got to the gate and as I boarded they gave me a new seat in WT+ with the seat next to me free. :ok: As it was an 1815 departure I was emotinally and physically knackered and could have broken down then and their. That upgrade was the best I have ever recieved in such trying cirumstances. Thanks BA.:ok: :ok:

As far as I know in my airline Check-In staff cannot upgrade. They don't know how many meals are on board and whether we might have 10 spare seats in C we usually don't carry any spare meals and it's company policy to only give business meals (and the whole service) in the business class i.e. Y meals are not allowed in C.
However, if someone has been particularly (and honestly) pleasant, and knowing that flight has been oversold in Y, check-in staff can put a little "SFU" message into the system, so that if the possibility of upgrading becomes a necessity then the gate staff can upgrade them :)

I have seen non-frequent travellers being upgraded before gold/silver FF members a few times as those card holders were very rude to our ground staff! :hmm:

Apaddyintheuk says

Basically it does not happen unless the aircraft requires upgrades as a result of an over booking!

This may be generally true, but is not absolute.

Any CSA Czech airlines silver or gold card holder is eligible for an upgrade (with some slight conditions for silver on long haul), if a free seat is available and catered.

As a gold card holder, I am generally asked if I would like an upgrade; if checking in away from Prague, sometimes the check in agent will forget (which is understandable given that they handle many carriers) and then a polite enquiry will gently remind them.

CSA are an excellent airline and this has got to be the best deal in the business for short haul travellers in particular.

Out of the last 25 flights segments, I must have been upgraded 23 times

^ I agree that it only happens when the lower cabins are oversold and pax need to be op-up'd.

At my airline we never upgrade anyone, regardless of what colour frequent flyer card they hold just because there are spare seats.

Of course, there's a world of difference between an upgrade in short-haul and one in long-haul. From the pax perspective you're getting a lot more space from a long-haul upgrade and vastly better catering whereas in short-haul the difference in space is at best scarcely detectable and at worst non-existent and the catering is a hot tray instead of cold.

From the airlines persective, the difference in price between a fully flexible short-haul ticket and one in club may only be a few £/$ whereas on long-haul the difference is likely to be 2-3x (very roughly speaking).

I must admit I don't understand the attitude. If you've got a spare seat and it's catered, why not improve customer satisfaction by upgrading a frequent flyer? Because it may upset those who have paid (read: who's company has paid) for their seats??

No, market discipline, aka you get what you pay for - so that (a) you don't get into the habit of expecting more than you paid for, and (b) you learn to pay for the "more" if you want it.

As a generalisation, the starting point is that frequent flyers are those who are most likely to pay a fare in the higher cabin. They are likely to be the ones who are being paid for by others, whichever cabin their ticket is written for. If you noticeably increase the chances that they can get a seat in the higher cabin for the price of the fare in the lower cabin, you'll start to erode your yields because some of the marginal decisions about what fare to pay will go one way rather than the other. In an industry where - despite all the talk about ticket x costing three times what ticket y costs - the difference between profit and loss can often actually turn on single digit percentage point changes in various factors, that could have a serious effect on your bottom line.

The extreme case here is the US airlines, who have long turned freebie upgrades for FFs on domestic flights into an industry-standard practice by various complex voucher schemes and what not. This must be a significant part of the fact that they have now become practically unable to sell any premium class fares on domestic routes.

Lol i'm guessing you're not a multi millionaire businessman with an attitude like that either!

These days my airline only caters for those on board, to save costs of course so no meals go to waste, so that solves the 'if it's caters' arguement.

It's all about protecting your product and making sure the exclusiveness of flying in the higher classes isn't dissolved by filling them up with people who haven't paid to sit there.

Also, frequent flyers really would book in lower classes knowing they'd get upgraded, they really would because everyone likes getting something for nothing.

Striparella,
There's another side to it, though. If you qualify on, for the sake of argument BA, to Gold status, and you aren't going to qualify for the 2400 point level that gives a free upgrade for 2, but you can do trips on say, SAS, for the rest of the year that build up to the SAS equivalent of BA Silver, there's every incentive to fly SAS once you've got your BA Gold. If BA had a more flexible up grade policy, then the FF incentive to stick with them is greater.
This actually is a decision I'll shortly have to make, as I will have qualified for BA Gold again next Friday. So do I go for a Star Alliance equivalent to BA Silver?

Oh let's have a good upgrade story to end this one. It happened to my Aunt many years ago, possibly back into BOAC days, at Lusaka, Zambia.

Delay of many hours in departure. Only one Brit was the station manager, others were local staff. He was getting a hard time from many, particularly a group of US mining engineers. Aunt takes pity on him, offers to get him a cup of tea as he couldn't leave his post, and has one or two other chats and encouragements along the way (which doubtless included some comments on aforementioned engineers).

When boarding finally started he asked her to step aside from the line. "Mrs. Aunt-of-WHBM, I have to say you are the only passenger here this evening who has been remotely civil to me. Now there is one seat left in First class. Would you like it ?"

OK, I'll bite.

Let's suppose that business requires me to travel transatlantic once a month. My client (quite understandably) won't pay the extra few grand for a Club ticket. I have the choice of two airlines:

Company A which, my own experience and that of my colleagues suggest, will upgrade frequent flyers on one leg out of two - so the red-eye back is in a nice flat bed.

Company B which refuses to 'dilute their product' by offering upgrades, even though the marginal cost to them may be quite small.

Guess which company gets my money?

Pax Vobiscum

Is it just a theoretic question or what? Which transatlantic airline will upgrade you on every second (longhaul!) sector just because you are FF?

I can't personally vouch for the current state of play, but this used to happen on some west coast routes a few years ago.

The point is, if I know (or even hear) that there's a fair chance (obviously not guaranteed!) of an upgrade with company A and no chance at all with B, that's going to influence my purchasing decision.

With respect, if your client won't pay the extra money for a business class ticket, then you're not in the bit of the market that matters in this equation. That's not intended to be a personal comment, but just an observation about where the airline will see you fitting in in the big picture.

(Similarly, my own flying is all leisure, historically almost all on deep discount economy tickets. I may have a shiny metallic-coloured FF card and all the perks that come with it, but I am under no illusions about how important I am - or more accurately am not - to the airline. I know that I get wildly more benefit from the airline than it gets from me. Commercially, I do not deserve the perks that I get, however frequently I fly on those tickets.)

Where the numbers matter is when you have a company that's buying dozens or even hundreds of business class seats on a particular route every week, or perhaps a mixture of business class and economy class seats. What the airline is trying to do is to stop that mix changing. If, by applying market discipline, the airline can prevent (say) 10 business class seats a week from converting into economy class seats, that more than makes up for the loss of one economy class customer who will never buy a business class ticket. And that, it seems to me, is the game that the airlines are actually in.

Times have indeed changed. Corporate deals, with clients who have extensive route use, will very often involve upgrades behind the scenes which airline staff and even the passenger would not be aware of!

Hypothetically, say every 6th sector is an upgrade, it will still be ticketed as "J" class but actually billed as "Y" (or "F" class but billed as "J").

However, in recent times, it has become more usual for corporates to ask for "cash rebates" on their travel rather than upgrades or lounge access (which might benefit their employees!!!) Cheapjack Accountants!!!

That having been said, Corporate Deals are getting tougher as airlines are starting to wake up to the fact that customer loyalty is now a thing of the past!

Thinking about it (there's a first time for everything!), the upgrades may well have been because the tickets were being purchased by a Global 100 company and they may well have spun a corporate deal that included a serious amount of upgrades (rather like similar companies have with car rental operations, whereby you automatically get a car one grade up from the one you booked).

I take your point, Globaliser, but regularly flying long-haul (even in economy) I or my clients end up spending a serious amount of dosh. Isn't it worth an occasional upgrade to help secure my business?

I think bealine's right, fewer and fewer corporates are prepared to spring for Club these days (I'm old enough to remember when F was standard for long-haul :{ ).

If you fly enough, and on sufficiently profitable fares, to reach a higher tier in the airline's frequent flyer scheme, then you should expect to get the occasional upgrade as a result when it's operationally necessary. The other travel perks that come with it, though, are reliably available every time you travel. These, I find, are the real benefit of sticking with one airline or alliance, and they are what secures my business.