- Hi guys, welcome to the video this week
and hope you enjoyed the last week, the travel hacks
and you benefited a little bit from it.
We're gonna continue this week talk about
how do you get an upgrade.
Everybody love this word, and upgrade during the travel.
And also I'm gonna show you a very cheap
Lufthansa first class Swiss first class airfare.
So stayed tuned for this week's series.
The news this week is there's an amazing cheap Lufthansa
Swiss first class airfare from Athens, from Greece to China
so it's actually on my website, samchui.com.
If you're not familiar, this is my website here.
I have a blog which I will try to put lots of stuff
on my blog and let's go to check out
the fare restriction before we talk about more.
The fare is 2500 euro round trip in first class.
You can fly either Lufthansa or Swiss
or a combination of them to Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.
You need to book by 29 of April
and you can travel all the way to 16 December.
Minimum stay is three days, maximum stay three months.
The only thing is the blackout does not allow travel
in the peak summer from 29 June to 26 August.
Now I'm gonna show you one more new website here.
This site here is called ita Matrix Airfare Search.
Some of you already heard of.
This is actually before Google flight.
This is the search engine that powered the Google Flights
as well so what it does it's a free tool.
It can search, let's say Athens to Hong Kong here
and I put in 10 and 17 by random date in May
'cause I am actually very tempted
to get to Athens to fly this.
And let's have a look, the results here
it's gonna give us, okay so we found a nice cheap fare here
so you can see Athens to Munich,
Munich to Hong Kong is 380.
Hong Kong to Frankfurt on the A340, 600.
And then Frankfurt to Athens.
And it gives you all this combinations.
You can see also multiple airlines
so what this means is it's going out
on the Swiss to Hong Kong with triple seven
in first class and coming back on Lufthansa
on the A340, so I think there's lots
of combinations you can play with
whenever you want to fly Swiss triple seven,
Lufthansa 340, Lufthansa A380,
and the nice this about ita Matrix is you can
do almost like a calendar search.
So I'll show you one more thing here.
So let's say I wanna depart on May 11,
I'm going for five days looking for first class.
So what it does then it's gonna search
all the combinations possible in May and June,
and you can also scroll down July, August,
every month for five days from May 11, five days.
So this is basically a very useful calendar.
You can overview the departure date for your plan.
Guys, if you remember last week I was showing you
a website called momondo.
Momondo usually can beats the airline ticket price
from the airline official site.
So looking at this from Athens to Hong Kong
on a random May date I found Lufthansa website's
3074 is shows and momondo can find you a cheaper site
and take you to that particular site to book.
So momondo can maybe save you additional money
booking a expensive airfare like this.
Your first class experience with Lufthansa
starts from their awesome and unique first class lounge
or the first class terminal in Frankfurt.
Inside this first class lounge terminal
they have a great design, a great bar,
a nice buffet spread with lots of good meats.
Waiter, waitress service on dining.
Perhaps the most impressive experience I like
is to ride in the brand new Mercedes S class
or a Porsche 10 that take you directly to your plane.
(light piano music)
Once on board you find identical first class seats
installed across the fleet.
On airbus A330, 340, on the 380 and 747-8.
Of course my favourite is the 747-8 in row one.
Why, because no one's in front of you.
The pilots sit upper deck and behind you as well.
Caviar is always served as the first course
on dining on Lufthansa first class.
You'll find loads of food and it depends on the destination,
you'll get special cuisine like Chinese food
Indian food, in short there's no shortage
of food on Lufthansa first class.
You can have look on my footage here.
(light piano music)
So guys no we're gonna talk about upgrades.
So the upgrade is holy grail word of travel
and there's two types of upgrade by the way.
One is a free upgrade which everybody loves.
So I'm gonna show you what it mean
by free upgrade, how do you get it.
The second type of upgrade is actually a pay upgrade.
You use your miles, you pay using your cash
so we explore all the options so hopefully
you understand and make sure you don't overpay
for your upgrade.
So what do you mean by free upgrade?
Free upgrade is also mean operational upgrade.
So a free upgrade will happen when there
is a situation that the plane is oversold
so they have to move some of the economy passengers
upgrading them to business class
so they can fly on the same time.
An airline has to be non-discriminatory
so they can't just give upgrade based
on the look of the person or how nicely
they get treated right,
so it's ranked by algorithm.
So I think usually when an upgrade happens
an operational upgrade happens,
it's usually favouring the top tier frequent flyers
of that airline programme.
So the platinum, the gold member
will get a chance to upgrade first.
Also some airlines nowadays are ranked by the fare you paid.
If you are paying a higher fare or a full fare,
your chance to get upgrade when there's
oversold situation happens is higher
than the other passenger.
So I wanna show you on Expert Flyer as you can see here
on the 24th of April, London Heathrow,
Dubai to London, so these are all the fare buckets
representing how many seats available in each class.
So economy is the highlighted bit from Y class.
Y is full fare economy down all the way
to the sub buckets.
Each class represent a different fare
much lower fare is the buckets towards the end.
So what you're seeing here is this flight EK7
has completely sold out in the economy.
It has actually one seats available in business class
which is J class and then it has three seats
available for selling full fares class fare.
So what that means is, yep, the whole economy's oversold
basically, it doesn't sell any more.
It could not sell any more.
But there is still a few seats available
in first and business class.
Let's have a look other flights here.
EK31 this one same situation, four seats available
in first class, one seat available in business
completely oversold, so what that means
is this is a target flight for those people
who want to have a operational upgrade happen.
You will rank by your frequent flyer status
and the fare you paid.
So if you are one of those paying high fare
and top, elite frequent flyer in that
airline programme Emirates, then your chance
to get upgrade is quite decent.
Now I'm gonna show you another situation here.
And this is a flight departing on the 23rd of April
from Abu Dhabi to Rome on Etihad.
So now you can see here this is another
reverse situation of earlier of what we've seen
is there's a lot of seats available in the economy
up to seven seat available for sale.
But in business class it's full, J class zero.
So in this situation here you would not
get a operational upgrade because
there's no seats to get upgrade to the front.
So for an operational upgrade to happen
or for any upgrade to happen you gotta
have a situation that there's gotta be seats available
in the premium cabin for you first.
So now let's talk about the pay upgrade.
So there's two different types of pay upgrade
you can upgrade yourself.
One is using cash and the other one's using miles.
So these days the norm is that airline
when you're booking economy they would
recognise you as a candidate for upgrade.
Before the flight you would get an invite email
or you can go to the airline sites
and type in your flight reference
and look for an upgrade option there.
The options generally available for bidding
or the airline would nominate a range
of price that you're willing to pay
and there's a minimum and maximum
and if you pay higher the chance to upgrade
is obviously better, and so now it's very important
to know a few things using this find of upgrade scheme.
One is that you should always pay below
the business class ticket price.
What I mean that, for example
if you're economy fare is $500
and you're business class fare is $1200.
If your look at Expert Flyer or Google Flights
or Skyscanner for example you found out
the difference of the fare.
So the difference of that is $700.
Then you should never pay more than $700
'cause otherwise you're defeating the purpose,
you're buying economy and paying more
than a business class fare at the end.
And secondly also the bid upgrade only works
when there's seats available closer to departure
and your upgrade will get confirmed.
Well I would suggest to leave the bidding
towards later, not immediately months ahead.
If you can bid about a few days earlier
before your flight and using resources
like Expert Flyer then you can probably
put in a lower bid because you know
if you look at, there's a lot of seats available
closer to departure then the airline
will be accepting a lower bid.
So you don't have to bid so high to secure your seat.
Now the other way to upgrade
like I mentioned earlier is using miles.
Now I'd be more careful with this approach
because generally I think they're are a better way
to use your miles than paying for an upgrade.
This is just my own view.
What you need to know is whether it's worth doing this.
It may cost you a lot of miles because
you have bought a very restrictive economy class fare
and it might cost a little bit less miles
if you bought a flexible economy class fare.
So the miles you have is not free, you know, is not free.
This is very important to understand.
You should know what the miles you have is worth.
What I really recommend and value the miles
is around one to one and a half cents each.
So let's say that if the upgrade costs you 40,000 miles.
40,000 and one and one half cents each
means it costs you 400 to 600 US dollars worth of miles.
And the other type of upgrade maybe is
at a check in counter when you go to check in
you can always ask if the premium class is available.
Whatever airline sells for a fixed price upgrade.
So some airlines like Thai Airways
they sell a fixed price upgrade no matter
what the economy booking class you do.
You might book the cheapest and then they will sell you
a fixed price upgrade to the front.
So this strategy might be worth to consider.
Again if you knowing the far difference beforehand
that will help you to make a much better informed decision
so you know you're getting away without it.
You don't wanna overpay for the upgrade
and end up paying more than what it should cost.
So the importance is to know the valuation of your miles.
To value your miles carefully
so you can make a informed decision here.
Thanks for watching this week's video.
I hope the content's useful.
Again if you have any feedback or you know
any deals you wanna share, please let me know.
Next week's very exciting for me.
I'm flying the Malaysia Airline A350 in first class
so watch next week's videos review.
See you next week guys.