This was a fun surprise.
The Accidental Upgrade?
First off, my Delta Medallion first class upgrade window opens 120 hours/five days prior to a flight’s departure time. Keep that in mind.
I flew from Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) to Los Angeles (LAX) the other night. My flight departed at 9:35 PM CDT.
At about T-minus 121.5 hours (7:50 PM CDT and five days prior) last week, I scrolled through the flight’s seat map to see if Delta offered any buy-ups for first class. Not that I planned to purchase one; as a blogger and travel enthusiast, I wanted to find out what they were charging.
Lo and behold, there wasn’t a price listed. Nearly 16 first class seats were open on the map. So I randomly tapped seat 5A just to see what would happen.
The seat icon changed from red (available) to green (meaning I now occupied it). No “Upgrade to First Class” window popped up on my iPad and tried to upsell me. So I simply pressed “Done” to see what would happen.
(I don’t have any screenshots, so you’re going to have to trust me on this one. 🙂 )
And my seat assignment stuck. No “You’re in a Comfort+ experience, keep dreaming!” message or anything like that appeared.
Too good to be true, right? After all, this was about two hours from that flight’s upgrade window opening. I was upgraded on my flight from Sioux Falls to MSP. But that shouldn’t have had anything to do with my MSP to LAX flight. As someone who takes a lot of connecting flights each year, this was a new one for me.
So I signed out of the app and logged back in.
Sure enough, I was still in 5A. (I switched to 5B because I prefer aisle seats on longer flights if given a choice.)
Whoo-hoo!
I texted René to see if he had any insight. He assumed it was a Delta IT glitch. I talked to another friend. He said, “Weird things can happen around upgrade time. Maybe you just got lucky.”
So why do you think I was upgraded before my window opened? Is there something I overlooked? An obvious rule I should know? Has this ever happened to you? Please share your thoughts in the below Comments section!
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I’m guessing your Sioux Falls to MSP flight was part of the same PNR as MSP-LAX and was within 120 hour window. The upgrade window is probably from the first flight segment on the PNR and not per segment?
It has happened to me about 5 times this year. Nice surprise, of course.
There is a well known glitch that with 2021 MQM boost promotion, some complimentary upgrades to comfort+ are actually earning premium class bonus. It happened to me once and again happened to my wife recently (2 weeks ago). Not sure what causes that but both times we were upgraded at the gate.
May be the system mistakenly thought Sioux Falls to MSP and MSP to LAX were one way flight with stop over at MSP?
The upgrade window is based on initial departure from FSD to MSP.
As far as we know, it’s 120 hours prior to a flight’s departure time. Or at least, it was.
Perhaps the time difference from where you live to Atlanta HQ? If it was only a few hours?
nice
I like @Michael’s answer. I do sometimes find that after the upgrade window hasn’t open and I haven’t been upgraded yet, that it’s possible to self-upgrade. This is a different problem though, in that I think the upgrade should already have been given but hasn’t. If Michael is correct though, it could be that what happened to you is a combination of what he said and what I said.