- 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.
