This is all good advice. To survive at IAD, you need to be Plat or higher. DCA.. I don't use that airport too often, but I suspect you need to be Plat as well.. maybe even EXP to survive.

I'm still Gold (will be higher by year's end). I tried to upgrade on the IAD-LAX flight on Friday morning. I was number one on the list two hours out and then I found out someone jumped ahead of me between two hours and door close. There was only one seat left.

I was keeping an eye on the seat chart and noticed around 100 hours out.. a lot of seats got taken up. So, there were a lot of EXPs on that flight. I wasn't disappointed, but I can imagine Golds don't have a large amount of upgrade success out of IAD, probably less so out of DCA.

I turned Gold a couple of weeks ago. The priority boarding alone is COMPLETELY WORTH IT. Got to throw my bag in the overhead bin and sit down and not have to worry about finding bin space. ^

*Edit: On the LAX-IAD flight, it was even more crowded. First Class was completely full and the waiting list had six people; no one cleared. This was a Monday night flight; 10:25pm arrival to IAD.