Originally Posted by
thedoorchick
Or, the system will stop you and force you to buy upgrades, period. Giving up the upgrade may not be an option; I learned this the hard way when I had an upgrade clear which I had requested weeks before, and in the meantime had run out of stickers. I had to buy stickers before being allowed to check in. Not ideal, but I considered it a valuable lesson learned for $60 and then sat back and enjoyed my wine.
I've never had the occasion to "un-upgrade" myself, but a few posts up-thread, someone did give some advice to a query on that topic:
Originally Posted by
johndeere19
Is there a protocol for canceling a requested sticker upgrade before it's processed/confirmed? I read that after it's applied, you can reject the upgrade at the gate and be moved back to Y, but you may lose your seat and there needs to be space.
Originally Posted by
miamigrad
Whenever I wanted to cancel an upgrade request, I always called the elite number (PLT at the time) to handle the request.
As you noted, if you wait until it's confirmed, you may get an undesirable seat (or worse, the flight could be completely full with no seat to give to you) if you decline the upgrade. My recommendation would be to get things squared away asap if you no longer want the upgrade.