I’m ticketed, aka how a work crisis cost me $186
Mar 25th, 2007 by Nick
I had planned on getting my trip ticketed a three weeks ago. Now, getting a vacation ticketed nine months in advance is a little insane, even by my standards. But there are only two flights per day with upgrade inventory available, and the coach seats which are used to set the base price to use my systemwide upgrades are going fast already.
Unfortunately, the Saturday I was going to take care of it, I needed to make an emergency work trip to a client site that morning. Everything not work-related went into the dumper for a couple of weeks, but it was worth it because we made a great client very happy.
I finally got around to dealing with the airfare this afternoon.
When I looked at prices back in February, the ticket price was $2220. Today, it was $2406. But the upgrade space was still barely available - I got the last upgrade seat for now on the LA-Sydney flight, and the upstairs exit row for good measure. The SF-Sydney also had the upgrade, but not the “W” fare. Time to chalk it up to making a client happy… and out came the credit card. At 9250 miles each way, it comes out to 13 cents/mile - about the same as an upgradable ticket to London during the center of the high season.
I could have saved a few dollars by buying two tickets (Chicago-LA, and LA-Sydney), but that has all sorts of problems starting with the fact that the Chicago-LA segments would be stuck in coach. The good news is that if the fare comes down, I can call up and they’ll send me out a voucher for the difference. The bad news is that if you get an inexperienced agent, you can lose your upgrade when the agent goes to move the upgrade to the cheaper ticket, and never get it back.
