Originally Posted by
jsloan
There is little evidence that this is still the case, and quite a bit of evidence that it is, in fact, no longer true.
That said, on the gate list, I'd expect someone with a waitlisted award to be ahead of non-GS CPUs, but not necessarily ahead of instrument upgrades. I'd expect someone using the credit-card CPU benefit to be last among their status level (that one I'm sure of).
I don't have hard evidence, just anecdotal evidence, I had to get manually applied as the last time I didn't transfer automatically to the airport list. The United club agent added me and with just silver status, I was almost dead last on the upgrade list that was about 70 deep, I went over to politely explain that I should have been waitlisted higher as I had paid for Premium cabin etc. She agreed and made some adjustments and I jumped to number 1 on an IAD-SFO flight. So perhaps she gave me a higher priority than she should have or that the computer does. It's also possible the system is adding folks with the wrong priority, but I guess that would be a feature, not a bug.