Originally Posted by
JimInOhio
A hunch -- UA chose to use the one available seat at the time to upgrade the lower status passenger on the PNR so the remaining passenger would have the better chance of the two for clearing later.
Definitely a good hunch and would be great if that was the case that they actively did that.
One reason to make me believe your comment above is that my wife was cleared into a seat that had someone next to it, but when I checked later, she had been moved into 1F, which had seat 1E open next to it. This happened on both the outbound and return flight, and I was
#1 on the list. - maybe they were anticipating that I was going to clear and moved her to those seats to ensure that we could sit together without needing to swap seats with anyone.
If that's the case, that's a great move on UA's part.