Delta Upgrade Mess With Companion
My fiance flies Delta for work often and is currently a GM while I have no status. I've been reading this forum for a while to help her out and I finally have our fun experience to share about our trip.
We were booked for a quick weekend trip this past weekend from BUF-DTW-IAD round trip on the same itinerary. She had been "upgraded" to an aisle C+ seat the week before and was unhappy about that so I made sure to remove us from the C+ upgrade seat and left us on the upgrade list for F.
Day before flight: Checked in 24 hours before the flight. Fiance called delta as C+ was only 1/4 full and she asked why we had not been upgraded. Delta agent told her that we could only be upgraded at the gate the next morning.
Received email that we had been upgraded on flight 4 (DTW-BUF) to F.
Day of our trip down to IAD: Check in at BUF and ask the agent about getting upgraded. There are 2 seats in first and we are 2 and 3 on the list so we ask to be put into C+ seats together. She can only upgrade my fiance and has to split our reservation in order to put her in C+. Tells us to ask the gate agent to upgrade me. We head to through security which is extremely backed up and get to the gate about 10 minutes before boarding. We ask the gate agent about moving me up next to my fiance and get told that a lot of people have missed a flight to ATL and were rebooked through DTW and that there are no more seats. However, my upgrade had gone through. Since my fiance had been upgraded to C+, I was apparently left as #2 on the upgrade list for F with no status!
The flight from DTW-IAD was a CRJ-200 and was Y only, so no upgrade issues here.
Day of our flight back to BUF: Wake up at 3:30 AM to get to the airport and I notice that I cannot see the upgrade list on my app anymore for the first flight of the morning. I then check the next flight, and see that I had been moved back to Y from my upgraded seat in F! When the agent at check in had split the reservation, it ended up moving me out of the upgraded F seat and back into my originally booked class. My fiance's seat had remained the same one in F that had been assigned when we were upgraded. She called them at 3:50 and was on the phone for about 20 minutes and the medallion rep was able to unsplit the reservation and luckily place me back in the seat next to her in F (it would turn out that there were only 6 in F of 12 and C+ was completely empty on this flight).
Although slightly out of order, this leaves us with the flight from IAD-DTW. There are 3 seats open in F and 6 in C+. There are 8 people on the upgrade list for F. My fiance is 1, but I am all the way down at 5. I believe that we should have been listed as 4 and 5 since she would have been down at my medallionless level, but I guess that the split itinerary was still causing issues with Delta IT. The gate agent was nice enough to get us 2 C+ seats together for that flight.
Altogether, it seems like Delta is having both technical and personnel training issues with the new C+ upgrade system and the new (and soon to be changing again) companion upgrade rules. They really need to do a better job of managing upgrades with companions, especially since we specifically booked seats together in case there were no upgrades available. For the first flight, we should have been able to get upgraded at check in since there were seats together in C+. If that first agent hadn't split the ticket, we would not have had to call Delta as we were headed to the airport, wondering why my upgraded seat had been moved from F back to Y. Our big learning for the next time we fly together is to never let any Delta agent split an itinerary, unless we are looking forward to issues for the rest of the trip.