Wanted to share a successful waitlist for Polaris J from AKL to SFO. I don't have any status, and I don't have the United Explorer card. I booked way in advance on April 2018 for one way economy award tickets for 2 pax for AKL-SFO for our trip on Feb 2019 and waitlisted for business class seats. I didn't want to get separate tickets for each passenger and had both passengers in the same ticket. I know chances for the waitlist to clear were higher if we have 1 passenger per ticket, but I took the risk.
Kept watching for business class availability but didn't see any come up. On Nov, we got an email that our AKL-SFO waitlist cleared and we were confirmed in business class. I didn't need to call to get the confirmation. We got the confirmation almost 2 months prior to our departure.
Waitlisting for 2 people in the same ticket is doable, but one thing we did was to waitlist just the long haul leg. We booked a separate first class award ticket for our onward trip from SFO-ORD.