Originally Posted by
HSaxa
Interesting. Thanks for the answer. Does that mean that lower elites / lower fare classes can get upgraded ahead of a higher elite / fare class because they can check in earlier ?
The list you can see is never acted upon until the GA processes the flight (about 30 minutes out).
It really should not be used as an authoritative indicator of your upgrade probability. It should only be used as a rough guide, since as
sbm12 pointed out, EUA uses a different prioritization, and EUA processes most upgrades.
The key differentiator is that tie tiebreaker between Elites of the same level and fare class is different between the two rankings. EUA uses the ticket purchase date, while the gate upgrade list uses checkin time.
It you watch the list closely you can see interesting things like #1 remain on the list while #2 gets upgraded. While it may appear that this is happening out of sequence, it really isn't -- #2 may be higher than #1 for EUA purposes, but not for gate upgrade purposes.