Originally Posted by
aj3713
First time poster, hopefully this is the right place to ask this question. My wife and I are flying EWR-LAS tomorrow. We have no status on UA but a family member, who is GS, applied RPUs to our reservation weeks ago. I check in right at the 24 hr mark (which, it appears from rereading the wiki, I maybe shouldn't have done? oops, used to flying AA). I check back on the flight status page about an hour later and my upgrade had cleared and hers had not, and our reservations had gotten split. Furthermore, her spot in the visible standby list had dropped to 6.
I was confused by all of this so called United - first the agent tried to tell me my wife didn't get upgraded because she didn't have an RPU applied. When I pointed out that couldn't be true since she was on the upgrade list, she checked again came back and said it was because of lack of availability (4J was available at check-in and it was down to 1J when I checked again - I'm guessing a couple people did a buy up?). I asked her about if she'd upgrade and the agent said shes "next on list to be upgraded" despite it not showing that way on the upgrade standby list.
My questions are:
1. Is my wife actually "next on the list" to be upgraded? I understand that because the GR supported upgrades clear into PN this "should" be first to clear (in advance), but would this still be the case now post check-in or does it actually follow the standby list for her now? If the former, does this change at the gate?
2. If I have messed this up, do I have any recourse to improve my chances for both of us to get upgrades?
Thanks in advance for your help FT!
Welcome to FlyerTalk!
1 - Maybe. There's absolutely no way to be certain, because the list that the upgrade would come from prior to the gate isn't published. You've got it exactly right -- she should be waitlisted for PN whereas any non-GS member on the list should be waitlisted for PZ. It will follow the published list if it gets to the gate (which is likely -- they're extremely unlikely to clear an upgrade into the last available seat until the gate).
2 - At this point, no; what's done is done. You can switch seats with her if you'd like to let her sit up front.
. You can check her reservation to see if there's a buy-up that you're comfortable paying, but your chances of having that GPU clear are pretty slim.
I'm not sure that we're 100% certain how the gate list is supposed to look. Instruments are supposed to be ahead of non-GS CPUs, but it's possible that a GS member on a CPU would trump a non-status member on an RPU (even a GS RPU). It's also possible that all instruments are lumped together at the gate, so that a general member on a GS RPU might be behind a platinum member on a non-GS RPU. It's really difficult to get good data, since we're typically extrapolating from a situation with a lot of missing facts.
Hope this helps.