Originally Posted by
villox
2. My understanding from
this post is that "O" should have been the proper class to look for saver availability in Global First. But it instead corresponded to "ON" and indeed on my reservation I'm booked into ON class and there's a checkmark with "Upgrade Confirmed".
So which is it? ON or O? Is there some sort of instant upgrade on award seats, or something to do with me being 1K? On EF this class is called "Saver Award for Plat Elites & Upgrades" The agent also seemed surprise that I was referencing ON class as if she was looking for O - should she have needed to do something else for me as a 1K?
For reasons that escape me (probably having to do with SHARES, or perhaps just because the alphabet has only so many letters in it), United recycles some of its fare codes. In particular, ON and JN do double duty as:
(1) Upgrade space for revenue tickets,
and
(2) Award space (3-cabin First and Business, respectively) that's only visible and bookable for elites.
At some level, SHARES can tell the difference (which is why you earn miles for Y-ups booked into JN but not for award bookings into JN), but at some levels it can't. So, for example, I have an award booked into ON (3-cabin First), and on my reservations page it happily says "Upgrade confirmed!" because that part of the system can't figure out which kind of ON it is.
Anyway, in this context ON is like XN -- it's O award space that only elites can see and book. If you're logged into your account, you can see it; if you're not, you can't. I have no idea what agents can see, but I don't think it's a simple question. A
good agent will see that you're a 1K and automatically flip whatever switches they need in order to see and book the elite-only space... but (obviously) not all agents are good.
I
think that elite awards will pull from O/I/X rather than ON/IN/XN whenever possible. But either way, other elites have access to both classes, so you're not screwing other elites in particular. If anything, it's GMs that get screwed, since elites use up the O/I/X space before they use up the ON/IN/XN space.