I know this has been discussed a lot, but having just come up against this, I have to comment...

My LHR-IAD flight on Monday, which showed as a 77Q 36 hours out, got swapped to a B777. Third time this has happened to me. In past years, UA has been able and willing at the airport to change my NC ticket to a different connection with the lie-flats. Once they pulled an additional SWU, but it got ironed out in the end. This time I get told by the frontline UA folks the absurd line "Sorry, we can't touch your reservation at this point. We can't see your M+ account, and we can't move things around to another flight. We can, however, downgrade you on your current flight if you don't want to use your cert."

I know in the wide scheme of things this is a minor thing -- reading about people losing confirmed transpac upgrades makes my own blood boil -- but it's just so intensely customer unfriendly to be told over and over again that simple things can't be done because the "system won't allow it" is just ridiculous. I can appreciate that PMCO folks were used to this, but we PMUA folks were most certainly not, and the extent to which they've utterly failed to manage expectations is staggering.