AgencyGuy - welcome to the board. Genuinely hope for some positive takeaways for CX, ICLP and the travellers via your discussions here.
I think that this has come up before in a post about someone in HKG being contacted for an upgrade for a flight to Australia.
On the points that you raise:
- No personal experience, but know of people, who have used optiontown.com (largely in the Indian context)
- Yes.
- As a CX status holder - Yes!
At the least, it should not be dilutive of CX status benefits (a status holder, not getting the option to, and seeing a non-status traveller getting the upgrade). Not a direct corollory, but believe that a fair few US programs' frequent fliers are fairly annoyed at missing their upgrades to cheap kiosk-offered upgrades. Yes the programs are different, with upgrades being a published benefit for elites there, but CX wouldn't want to run this program in a manner that makes the frequent fliers feel negatively about it (cant figure out how they could - but am sure that its possible)
- Again, with no other hard data to go by, sounds reasonable! Though I would want to watch out for a high status passenger, booking in a high fare class at the last minute, losing out to an infrequent traveller booked in the cheapest fareclass (but long in advance)
Good luck!