Resurrecting this old thread because I've just got "Upgrade: Denied" myself on one of my legs at T-72 hours.

Based on most of the anecdotal data points in this thread, it seems like most stories which start off "Upgrade: Denied" seem to end with "I got the upgrade anyway". But I doubt that'll be the case for me.

The confusion seems to arise because I have a domestic and an international leg. I put in for a miles+copay upgrade to cover both legs, and the domestic leg only has changed from "Waitlisted" to "Denied" while the international leg remains "waitlisted".

I don't hold out much hope of getting either upgrade, though. The domestic leg is hub to hub (SFO-EWR) and the seatmap is jam-packed, while the international leg (EWR-ZRH, UA978 1/14/11) seems to have no biz-class seats left at all according to my dummy booking. I suppose it's possible that someone in Biz will upgrade to First, though, leaving a seat available.

I don't mind not getting an upgrade and saving myself 20,000 points and $550, but boy, United sure does need a less confusing way of communicating to people the status of their upgrade requests.

Update to previous message: the sector that said "Upgrade denied" now says both "Confirmed" and "Denied". It let me re-select my seat, so I took 1A.

However, I'm now seriously confused -- did I get upgraded on UDU or on my miles+copay request?

My miles+copay request still hasn't gone through for the long international sector, and frankly I doubt that it will due to the fact that the business-class cabin appears to be full already. So I really want to make sure I don't wind up in a situation where I pay 20,000 miles and $550 and only get upgraded for the domestic leg. Can anyone confirm that this can't happen?

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(Later)

Replying to myself again (just for the benefit of anyone in the far future who has this same problem) I called up and they told me (a) that my domestic leg[listed as both cleared and denied online] was definitely cleared, but (b) my international leg was waitlisted and extremely unlikely to clear.

Apparently under these circumstances if the second leg doesn't clear then I'll just be charged the miles+copay (or miles + no copay in this case) for the first leg and not the second. Sounds reasonable, although I don't like the fact that it's 20,000 miles anyway with the only difference being the $550 copay.

She also reassured me that the UDU list was not looking 1P-friendly so I wouldn't be getting back into First if I chose to remove the upgrade. I think I'll stick with the upgrade this time, though I don't plan to make a habit of paying 20,000 miles to upgrade trans-cons.

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tl;dr: Got "upgrade denied", meant upgrade cleared. Another data point for you.