I had a weird upgrade experience to FC earlier this week. I was originally scheduled 7:37pm DAL to PDX, but that morning Alaska notified me that the flight was severely delayed due to ATC (new flight time departing 11:25pm arriving in PDX 1:30am!!). I had been upgraded to FC on that Alaska Skywest flight, but I had to find another flight because the last shuttle to Salem (my home) is 12:45am.
Alaska phone agent in Seattle was super nice and moved me to the 3:15 DFW to PDX flight, putting me in premium class. I was super happy. I got to the airport, was first in the upgrade list, and boarded with my mobile app, and towards the end of the boarding process, an older lady comes up and has a printed boarding pass with the same seat number in row 10 as me. So, she says, "Maybe you were upgraded." She went to get the flight attendant. And the FA comes back with a boarding pass for me for FC. And, the lady who had my same premium class seat says to me, "Oh, that was originally my seat in FC, but they moved me back to premium just before boarding. You must have had higher status." And I was apologetic, and she laughed and in good humour said, "No you're not, go take the first class seat and enjoy your meal." I don't really have a reason to disbelieve the lady's story. I've often seen FA's upgrade elite customers after boarding is almost complete to empty FC seats, and I really appreciate Alaska doing this (AA gate agents, under time pressure, have a history of flying off without even bothering to process upgrades). But, in this instance, Alaska did not move me to an open FC seat, but instead switched me with another customer after I had boarded. I wonder if that is part of the weird IT upgrade processor behavior? The Korean chicken and lemon tart were tasty.