One year with Seats.aero

I joined Seats.aero a year ago and then quickly realized those instantly-confirmable PlusPoints upgrades are also eligible for Mileage Upgrade Awards. With that knowledge, the need to chase 1k status for PlusPoints and upgrade pecking order basically vanished. That is to say, we've mostly been finding confirmable upgrade seats, paying for an Economy ticket, and then using the Mileage Upgrade Award to instantly upgrade to Polaris (usually 30,000 miles + $500). 

Giving a quick glance over these 12 months of flying here's a few things that occur to me:

• Flexibility is key. Given Kel has an American job with its max-4-weeks vacation and 3 mandatory office badge-ins per week, we've had to buy him tickets on several occasions instead of flexing his date to one with a confirmable upgrade seat. Tim and I have a lot more flexibility so we've been able to take better advantage of those
• Sometimes all the flexibility in the world won't help and you're left with two options: pay for the flight or do the ole "buy Premium Economy and apply PlusPoints and hope" thing. I just had to do that for my upcoming flight to Korea and thank the gods my upgrade came through 24 hours after booking. There's nothing at all relaxing about an upgrade that doesn't clear until you're scanning your economy boarding pass at the gate

  

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• This brings me to the next point: if you don't make 1k, you aren't going to have any PlusPoints to do that trick! Without even trying I've made Platinum for next year, so I will have a whopping 40 points -- enough for 1 international Polaris leg. But looking over this year's flying, the flight to Korea I just mentioned is the ONLY one where we did the "PlusPoints and hope" thing, so I think we'll be ok... (UPDATE: two days after I wrote that I got a Seats.aero alert that confirmable upgrades were available on that very flight. So there wasn't a lot of hoping necessary, I guess)
• Sometimes even the "PE and hope" strategy fails you and you're just left biting the damn bullet. Due to NYE falling mid-week, there were no options at all for getting home other than Kelly taking an extra day of leave and flying home from Sydney on Tuesday the 7th, and even then, the flight was $3500 one way with a 14 hour layover in Seoul. Ugh. Everything else was sold out and the prices were quite high and getting higher. Our fare bucket was high enough that I can get a refund from Asiana minus like $100, so if one of my 100+ Seats.aero alerts fires I could potentially still take a different flight. United wanted $3000 for Premium Economy PLUS 30,000 miles and a $500 copay just for the chance of getting an upgrade... Given how full the flights are and how far down the pecking order MUAs are, I was not at all excited about that option. 
• I've been making personal notes about finding upgrade space here. USA-Asia upgrade seats seem to come available about a month out... with a few exceptions here and there. When I can only find one leg of a desired trip, I've been booking a placeholder seat and then keeping my Seats.aero alerts set. For example, I found Tim a confirmable upgrade seat TO New York but none were available returning. I bought him an economy flight back (US customs likes you to have a flight home when you enter the country) and then we waited. Midway through his trip confirmable space opened up on SFO-Auckland and I asked him if he was willing to do a 2-stop itinerary home to guarantee a Polaris seat and he said yes. 
• Definitely have to remind myself of my original advice on here from a decade ago - price the flight out in cash first and decide if that's just the easiest way to go. Looking at the math, I think routing through Auckland ended up being a financial wash at best. United couldn't route him all the way to Sydney on their partner Air New Zealand, so we had to buy Tim a separate coach ticket on Qantas ($500) plus a fare difference ($570). He wanted to spend the day in Auckland and didn't know that taxis cost as much as NYC there (US$100 to get into the city from the airport). Add to that locker fees, ATM and money exchange fees and we're well north of $1000 to give him a guaranteed Polaris seat and a sightseeing day in NZ.