upgrade on one leg of flight only?

[Misthios]

I may be travelling to the US to speak at a conference next year, should hear this week whether my proposals have been accepted. Getting there will involve three flights (as I will have to use BA and their partners) so fly Scotland - London - somewhere in the US (probably Seattle or Dallas) then a regional airline shuttle to my final destination.

Have been saving Avios points in the hope of being able to upgrade on the long leg of the flight only. Don't see any point in being business on an hour flight to London, or a 90 minute flight the other end. I may also decide to stop over on the way back and have a day exploring Seattle or similar. Is it possible to book the whole thing online with just one leg as business or will I have to go through the call centre?

Have no idea about flight upgrades but I love Seattle, been there 5 times. So I'd recommend going there!

Also the BA direct flight LHR-SEA is only 9.5 hours so not as painful as some of the other possible massive long flights.

Yes I have various options for connecting and Seattle is the best of the lot in terms of somewhere nice to spend a few hours. I'd get in about 6pm, the flight to London leaves at about 7pm the following day, so early start and I could have an evening and a morning to mooch around.

To break the journey in Seattle you would need to use the multi-city search option. You can usually upgrade one complete leg of the journey online but I don’t think you can do a partial leg. But the upgrade on the short connecting flight might not be available or may be very inexpensive anyway.

I'm not sure I understand the trip - Seattle is 2,000 miles from Dallas!

What is your final destination?

Seattle and Dallas are hubs. OP’s final destination probably isn’t next to either one of those cities, but they will have both long haul flights on oneworld (BA + partners), and flights to OP’s smaller / regional airport.

To break the journey in Seattle you would need to use the multi-city search option.

This is probably the easiest way of trying to upgrade only the long haul leg fairly easily.

Book the trip as:

Scotland - final destination
Final destination - Seattle (or wherever)
Seattle - Scotland

Then you can just upgrade that last leg.

Otherwise, it’s quite common in America to upgrade at the gate before you board, but this obviously isn’t a guarantee as it will depend on availability.

Yes ...

But if the final destination is, say, Portland, the flight time from Seattle is 1 hour and the flight time from Dallas is 4 hours.

I couldn't make sense of your title and was trying to work out where you would sit to have one of your legs in business and one in economy 🤣

In my experience of using points to upgrade, the availability of these flights is very slim as they only designate 3 or 4 seats in BC, and they sell out up to a year in advance.
We had to book in April to get upgraded seats for January using points.
So if your trip is fairly soon then you may not be able to get an upgrade. Don’t convert your points until you are sure you can use them on the flight!

Hah! Not a contortionist!!

Final destination is Salt Lake City, BA do not fly there from the UK at all. So suggested route is London to Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago and then an internal domestic flight with a partner airline. Depending on the transfer hub, it's an under 3 hour flight, to Dallas it's about 2hr 30m, Seattle is 2h 15m, Phoenix 1hr 40m. Quite happy to sit in economy from Scotland to London and then on the US internal flight if it will save a bit of cash - the conference pays a set amount in travel expenses for speakers outside N America so it is in my interests to stretch that cash as far as it will go.

Westjet fly from Edinburgh to Calgary, Canada. They also fly from Calgary to SLC.

That would be ideal but the site isn't coming up with any flights when I check.