Originally Posted by
drewguy
UA upgrade system opened one PN slot ~ T-4 (but not PZ), which my companion got because the RPU had been applied to her reservation a month ago, whereas it was deemed applied to my reservation only after the split occurred around T-24. She had inherited by 1K status for this flight, and "won" the time of application tiebreaker. She jumped
#1 (and
#2 ) on the visible list, who presumably was 1K on a non-GS RPU but higher fare class than us) because of the PN slot. Then there was a buy-up for the 15th seat, or perhaps a pax who had missed earlier flight, so not an upgrade. Then at the gate they just went on waitlist order without regard to the GS RPU clearing first.
This sounds more or less plausible. Your order on the visible list after splitting the PNR is not deterministic; at least, I have gotten different orders on different segments from splitting the
same PNR (same ordering of seq, tickets, etc). Not clear whether you have 1K (WB) or GS (WA) priority on the visible list either with a GS instrument.. I think it's possible you both have GS priority and the first pax on the list was a GS looking for CPU (I don't think this is coded as a WL PN segment so it can be skipped before the gate).
There's a lot of murkiness here though, and I would love to go dig into the code
