Originally Posted by
star_world
Typically you'll be treated perfectly fairly by a CO GA in the event you want to volunteer for an earlier flight. This isn't a systems issue.
To fill in some personal, small experience on CO: I always ask whether the flight needs volunteers and always offer my seat if possible. (Although it's often inconvenient to be rerouted, I can usually accept the $/hr valuation of my time; and I would rather be inconvenienced if it can help someone else get home). In the past couple of years I've tried maybe 10 times out of maybe 50 CO flights. So, not very often.
In every one of those 10 times, at various stations (EWR, CLE, SEA for sure), the gate agent has always taken the first person who walks up to them. (In one case, in SEA, this person cut a line, my protests were ignored, and they took him as the only volunteer.)
It could be that the first person they take is also the top person on their electronic list. That really could be!
My proposed explanation is that this is a particular expression of a particular aspect of the UA/CO service culture for gate agents: the customer currently in front of you is the most important customer in the world. You stick with them until you've resolved their issue to their satisfaction, and only then do you move on to the next person.
I've seen agents do remarkable things to VDB their current customer. For example, I watched an agent who was working a flight with plentiful volunteers call up another airline and buy the customer an OAL ticket to their final destination, when there was plenty of CO availability that other volunteers might have used. And I was once VDB'd from SEA-CLE to SEA-ORD-CLE and the agent had such complicated problems with the reservation that it took the agent 45 minutes (no exaggeration) to reticket me -- with a huge line growing behind me all the time.
My small, limited experience has definitely borne out the idea that CO treats customers perfectly fairly if they want to volunteer. But in this case "fair" means something very specific like "help every customer in the order they arrive" and deliberately does not include murky issues like prioritizing elites, operational efficiency, or conserving OAL spending.