Will upgrades clear with a Y special meal ordered?
My wife and I are flying LAX-LHR on Saturday and we are waitlisted for upgrades to C using SWUs. There were still 16 open seats at last check so I'm hopeful we have a chance at clearing. My wife is a vegetarian and I would like to know of ordering her a special meal in economy could somehow inhibit an upgrade from clearing. We realize that if she gets upgraded at the gate, for example, that she would not get a business class special meal. That is fine since there is a veg pasta available per pre-order. My concern is that someone in Y could get 'stuck' with an AVML, so maybe AA won't do an upgrade for this reason.
The logic I'm applying to my concern isn't apples to apples, but when we were flying DL once, she was skipped over for an upgrade because she had a cabin pet in her reservation and the only seat available was a bulkhead which doesn't allow cabin pets. It makes perfect sense and the agent explained that he didn't make that decision manually, but rather that the reservations system will pick up on something like that and skip over a person.
Our UGs cleared at the time of booking on the LHR-DFW return, so that was nice. Bizarrely our ERJ-175 flight from SEA-LAX on Saturday has not cleared even though only 1 of 12 FC seats is taken and the flight looks to have quite a bit of space in Y as well if the seat map is any indication. I'm not worried about it clearing, but it's kind of baffling how their upgrade algorithms work sometimes.