Originally Posted by j2simpso

Cash upgrade offers will fluctuate (sometimes by the hour) in price depending on the demand in J and how far out you are in in departure (i.e. if J is only 50% sold 2 days out, United will release some inventory and start offering some insane upgrade deals). A couple months ago I had an EWR -> NRT leg where the offer got down to around $1100 and it's not unheard of for those offers to drop below the $1000 mark. At that point you have to ask yourself, is it worth shelling out the 30,000 miles + $600 copay, get put on a waitlist and hopefully have your upgrade clear amongst the countless 1K and GS applying GPUs or bite the bullet, accept the cash offer and hopefully earn the extra mileage.

The no-copy option was apparently an error on United's IT system. I myself saw that offer and tried applying it to a YYZ -> ORD -> NRT legs I have in December. Short story long the reservation then said R fare requested but didn't take any points out of my account. After being on the phone for nearly half an hour with the Premier Desk they determined it was made in error and told me I had to fork over the $600 co-pay (in addition to the miles) if I wanted the upgrade to process. As a Computer Scientist I'm a bit surprised that these bugs could get introduced into a system that has had fairly rigid rules from day 1 but who knows what the mess that is SHARES looks like architecturally.

Safe Travels,

James