The policy change is a net positive move for customers until United implements a consistent, fair, and reliable process for manually booking re-protect segments.

Agents were all over the place on the use of re-protect segments, with inconsistency to a degree that frustrated customer expectations and created absurdities. To bocastephen's point, I'm sure that, upon review, there were many instances where a 1K/GS/Plat was denied a backup option by an agent and ultimately forced to go standby (or not go at all), while a non-status customer got the last seat on that same flight moments later from a more cooperative agent. No consistency whatsoever.

IMHO, the only times agents should be manually inserting re-protection segments are during DB scenarios where they have to keep hold of seats on a specific flight as part of the offering to the customer, or for certain interline bookings where inserting a backup leg is much preferably to a costly offline involuntary reroute.

Ideally, United should seek instead to better update flight status systems in real time, and tie the automated rebooking functions more closely to that such that agents would rarely need to manually work most reservations in IRROPS situations in the first place. This is the best practice used by most of the major global airlines, and United would benefit greatly from it.