FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - New waitlist requests for R/GPUs/miles accepted until 24 before departure (Upgrades)
Old Mar 15, 2012 | 10:13 pm
  #147  
goalie
Moderator: Smoking Lounge; FlyerTalk Evangelist
10 Countries Visited
1M
20 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: SFO
Programs: Lifetime (for now) Gold MM, HH Gold, Giving Tootsie Pops to UA employees, & a retired hockey goalie
Posts: 29,078
Originally Posted by UA Insider
Originally Posted by halls120
Shannon, what was the reasoning behind eliminating the ability to request an upgrade "on the spot" at the airport using an instrument? It seemed to work fine in the past.....
Originally Posted by pagotto
Shannon, Thanks - that's good to hear. But could you possibly clarify why the new United has chosen to go to a more restrictive policy from the previous ability to apply upgrade requests on the spot and whether work is in process to go back to the more customer-friendly approach? Thanks

Hi halls120 and pagotto, your both right. Previously, on the United side, there was a good process for this. All in all it’s much more a systems constraint than it is a business decision. The short answer is, we simply don’t have the right tools and process in place to support this at the moment. That’s not to say that we don’t want to get there though.

Shannon
Thanks for the update but if I may, imho, if SHARES is "more advanced", one would think that such a commonplace occurrence as is being discussed would have already been part of the "more advanced system". Sorry, and with all due respect, I'm not buying it/drinking the Kool-Aid that the capability is not there as the reason. The system conversion prep had been going on for how long and you mean to tell me that this feature (which almost every other major airline has) was not to be included? Yeah, I'm in a cranky mood but it just boggles my mind that this and other "issues" are the result of a lack of technology resources when the system that was replaced had the very same resources (and they worked!)
goalie is offline