Originally Posted by
ACYYZ/SD
The most important factor here being, did you have the proper credits or fare category to entitle you to an upgrade?? On those occasion's when Customers have questioned this on-board, it was determined that 99.9% of the time despite status, the above was absent. I can only speak from experience, but employees who are upgraded into J are done so if they bear the proper eligibility/priority, and after the entitlements of revenue Customers are looked after.
I think you are probably right, however the optics are still bad. When you have customers who have paid in some way to get on to the flight (even if it is by way of an award ticket) and they have status, certainly SE100K status, then it really looks like AC prefers to take care of its own employees rather than revenue-generating customers. So while it may make sense, I do think it looks bad and causes hard feelings.