Originally Posted by John Aldeborgh

I don't understand this point of view. First off, there are very few people who have flown more UA coach than me, at 60 I've flown almost 4.2M BIS miles on UA and my employers, for the past 35 years, have never been willing to buy J tickets, regardless of the destination, even my current employers CEO flies coach. Case and point, last Wednesday I flew TPE to SFO in a coach middle seat with a 73 year old terminal cancer patient on one side and a young mother with a 6 month old in her lap on the other side, and I forgot my Bose headset. My point is if you buy coach tickets you need to assume you will end up in coach, this way any upgrade is a welcome perk. Many have offered that learning the system is the best advice, choose the day, time and maybe city of departure or arrival, this can make a huge difference in your ability to upgrade. I for one have never had difficulty using my upgrades but I always assume I'm riding in back until proven otherwise. Remember, it's the expensive tickets up front that subsidize the low fares in coach, my last trip - BOS to ICN to TPE to SFO to BOS cost about $1500.00 so it's hard to justify the same trip in BF when the fare is $5K or $7K. When I'm feeling bad about siting in coach I simply think about the $4K to $6K I'm saving, maybe it's the Yankee in me but it's hard to feel bad about the savings, even at my age.