<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I am not sure how often you travelledon these fares, but in the last few months of CP's existence, we had a number of posts about the fact that they were now charging a change fee on such same day stand-bys.</font>
CP never did charge for same day standby
requested at the airport when you checkin. I think you got it confused about our discussions back then. CP used to be very "relax" in collecting change fee, if you call and make a change to your reservation before you head out to the airport, they don't always remember to collect the change fee. However, towards the end, they implemented something in the system that forces the agents to collect the change fee before printing the boarding passes. They continued to allow same day standby right until the end of their existance.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">If there are 50 open seats on a 319 or 320 an hour earlier than my scheduled flight then what is the problem with letting a pax (or at the very least us FFs) go on that earlier flight?</font>
Simple... because that will
force you to pay $145 in change fee if you really want to get on! Even though they have nothing to lose to put you on an earlier, in most cases you are helping them because the later flight might be overbooked and you are freeing up a seat by taking an earlier flight. However, AC seems to think that they rather take your $145 CASH change fee and give out $300 bump voucher DB passengers because those might not be used before it expires. It's all about squeezing the max $$ they can from us.