Originally Posted by
baliktad
The SDC policy as a Gold is that you can SDC for free, but not until the calendar day of the flight (ie, starting at 12:01 AM).
As a non-Gold, you can SDC for $25 starting 6 hours prior to your desired flight time. So non-Golds cannot request to SDC to a 2PM flight until 8AM. This gives Golds a timing advantage, especially if you are willing to stay up till midnight.
More details on Alaska's
Same-Day Change page.
Correct.
What it also means is that if you're flying flights with a connection as a non-Gold, you can't make the change in flights until ALL flights are within 6 hours.
The practical effect is that you're probably not going to be doing SDC if there's a connection and you're not on a route that has a lot of frequencies (say, you're flying BUR-PDX-XXX).
Chip chip chip™.