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I booked with Delta. Their website says to just show up early and ask to be placed on the standby list for 1st class and pay a nominal fee for the upgrade...that's about it. Is their another way to approach this or is this the only way besides paying for an outright seat when 1st making the reservation ?
You buy a first class seat - basically cancel your coach seat and buy the first class seat. Pay the additional change fee of $150.
Other than that, you are out of luck unless you are a medallion level flyer. Lets see you are going to Utah, Salt Lake City - a Delta hub, lots of medallion flyers wanting upgrades and they will take priority. Your chance of getting an upgrade for the standby upgrade fee is practically zero.
Forget about getting an upgrade from a friendly airline check-in employee. That doesn't happen anymore, probably didn't happen much before. Nope - all the upgrades go to medallion flyers (like me), we get unlimited upgrades, or to people that pay the first class premium when they originally book their seat.
Maybe you can fly 25,000 miles on Delta before your flight (silver medallion level) and earn the privledge to fly up front?
You buy a first class seat - basically cancel your coach seat and buy the first class seat. Pay the additional change fee of $150.
Other than that, you are out of luck unless you are a medallion level flyer. Lets see you are going to Utah, Salt Lake City - a Delta hub, lots of medallion flyers wanting upgrades and they will take priority. Your chance of getting an upgrade for the standby upgrade fee is practically zero.
Forget about getting an upgrade from a friendly airline check-in employee. That doesn't happen anymore, probably didn't happen much before. Nope - all the upgrades go to medallion flyers (like me), we get unlimited upgrades, or to people that pay the first class premium when they originally book their seat.
Maybe you can fly 25,000 miles on Delta before your flight (silver medallion level) and earn the privledge to fly up front?
Don't worry....you will get 1st class. Promise not to steal it from you.
That's it--assuming that they even HAVE a spare 1st class seat available! We've tried to do that several times, and there's never been a vacant seat, yet!
Dd714's right. Any remaining 1st class seats almost always go to medallion flyers. If you must have 1st class, change your reservation and pay the fee.
Yeah, just for further Delta info, there is a priority list that Delta follows and is managed by their computerized systems (the reason why a sympathetic ticket agent can't bump you up to 1st class with a wink anymore or by using a sob story that you had a difficult day):
-government gets first priority - air marshalls. They will bump paying 1st class passengers off to seat them where they are required to sit.
-then people that may have been bumped off of earlier flights, and ONLY if their is no room in couch on the current flight.
-then the medallions, who get free unlimited upgrades. That in turn has it's own priority base on medallion class (platinum, then gold, then silver) and their system even looks at the class of fare the traveler bought - discounted vs. full fare.
-then and only then, on the rare occasion that a seat is still open up front, then you can pay for the upgrade at the gate.
I've seen 20 or 30 people, medallion members, on upgrade waiting lists for flights to and from a Delta hub which by nature have alot of medalions as passengers - waiting to upgrade for the last 2 remaining 1st class seats. Even we have trouble getting our upgrades.
Sometimes it helps to fly mid-week, or on an unpopular travel day. But the upgrade game is harder than it was 10 years ago - I used to fly more, but back in the day most planes were not 99%+ full, and as Gold or Silver Medallion I almost always got the upgrade. I have heard that they typically have 2-4 skymarshalls in first class, that eats up a good bit of the seating.
The $150 upgrade is only if they have one or two seats left over at the gate, sometimes they have it and sometimes not.
Again the best bet is to try to find an off-peak day and time of day.
You wouldn't know it from the way things are now, but it was actually fun to fly before 9-11.
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