Originally Posted by
mmack
Sorry. I did not mean to imply that I would be disrespectful to a gate agent or indeed anyone working the front lines at United! Simply that, as discussed above, the GA often needs to call a help desk anyway, or the supervisor or another agent next door to figure something out.
All I want to know is, if I have a Z fare ticket, I am entitled to a rebooking into another business class seat if a flight is cancelled, ie goes mx, as noted in the original post.
I appreciate all your insights into the workings of the ground staff at UA!
No problem...just the "on the phone with a, while talking to b" thing is both counter-productive and uncool. Sure, you get booked into the same class as originaly ticketed in. There are many times where a person chooses not to wait for the next available flight in their original class, and choose to take whatever comes earliest though. You have to remember that the cries of "we want confirmed upgrades as far out as possible" have been heard by those at UA that allocate upgrades, and this, of course reduces the premium cabin availability for rebooking in the event of an irrops situation.
I don't have much clout, but I have lobbied time and time again, to reserve a fair supply of premium cabin space for gate upgrades as a) UA can sell them (and if not, a gate upgrade takes almost no time) and b) it can be use for premium cabin protection for both online and offline irrops. It seems that the marketing arm of MP though has more clout than me, and they say that customers would rather have confirmed CPU in advance than be be able to purchase a premium cabin seat when they want it at last min. A balancing act, to be sure, but one where I think the CPU crowd should lose out (IMHO) against the revenue F, the buy up, the equipment substitution downsize, and the irrops protection faction. The pain of waiting till the gate to get an upgrade, IMHO is small compared to the benefits of reserving seats for the later group of needs. Clearly, my opinion is not the one that counts though.