- Don’t expect to get a free upgrade anymore.
- Airlines have gotten smarter about pricing their premium cabins.
- You can pay for an upgrade, use miles or buy extra legroom seating.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and no matter what the internet may try to tell you, there’s also basically no such thing as a free upgrade on a plane anymore.
You can’t “hack” your way into the pointy end of the plane by wearing a collared shirt or flirting with your flight attendant. You’re not going to get a lie-flat bed by asking nicely at the gate, and no one is popping Dom Perignon as a pre-departure beverage for you just because you think you have a strategic check-in time.
“It’s just not going to happen,” Brett Snyder, author of the blog Cranky Flier and owner of the travel agency Cranky Concierge, told me.
Part of the problem is airplanes are just fuller now than they used to be, and airlines have gotten smarter about pricing their seats.
“First class fares used to be so high that people wouldn’t buy them, and instead you just had massive numbers of elite upgrades and all different sorts of people sitting up there that weren’t paying for it, they were just getting it as a perk,” Snyder said. “At some point the airlines realized, if we start pricing this as a fare upsell, we can get people to actually pay for these seats. Now you have a lot fewer seats that are available for an upgrade because people are buying.”
As someone who has paid cash more than once…
