Maybe it's nothing, but I just noticed this, I wonder if it is the new modus operandi for the airline...

BEFORE:

If you have a pending upgrade, when you register at the counter, the agent or the kiosk would print out your boarding pass (in Economy) PLUS one boarding pass indicating you are on the waitlist for Business/First.

It had the advantage of being pretty transparent.

NOW?:

Took thw BOS-EWR-BOM flight at the beginning of the month... Get to terminal A. I put my name in the upgrade list 1.5 months ago with a systemwide, yet the agent doesn't really understand what is a global upgrade "yeah, I heard of it, but we (Continental) didn't use to do that". I asked her to check if my name was on the list. Wasn't. "Please humor me". To her great astonishment, my name is successfully added to the upgrade list. But I have to take her word for it - no evidence of the pending upgrade is given.

Once in EWR, surprise surprise... my Economy BP is rejected. Quick verification, I am in Business! Cool. So, instead of reprinting the pass, they simply wrote by hand my new seat.

I had the feeling of a stowaway until the time they closed the door of the aircraft. But hey, maybe they were rushed...

Came back from Shanghai. Same thing happened. My name was already on the list. A fair number of seats, but employee would not confirm the upgrade at registration, everything handled at the gate. Went to the gate 10 minutes in advance, employees not in any hurry to answer anyone. Queue breaks down, I finally speak with an agent. She looks her list, writes a new seat assignment on my existing BP. I get to the scanner, even with the old seat encoding, the scanner wouldn't even warn the boarding agent my seat had been reassigned.

To make a long story short:

1- Is this a policy of the new United to save on trees by printing as little as possible? If so... when can they stop sending me a credit card offer every week? And perhaps send me my new MP card while they are at it.

2- Couldn't this system bring down major pain here? When an employee just writes a new seat assignment, say she makes a mistake. You have two irate customers competing for the same seat. How is that an improvement? Every happened to anyone?

3- If you need to follow-up on unposted miles, how would these be handled?

4- And, frankly, what it says to me is: if you want your upgrade, you have to fight for it. Pester the gate agent, demand an answer to very specific questions (like: what is my rank on your secret list, and how many seats are not taken), because I think there is a fair amount of haphazard processes going on here. For instance in both EWR and PVG, they NEVER called anyone to the podium before boarding. What if you board and THEN they ask for you? I seriously doubt they will come and pick you at your seat for upgrading, they are not organized enough.

Someone at United should seriously think about reverting to the old ways instead of holding the hope of selling every business class seat all the time. When it is -24HRS, how many seats out of 10 can they REALISTICALLY sell? Well, unless they are dirt cheap, in which case global premier ups lose all meaning - and then, frankly, it means the loyalty program loses all meaning.