Originally Posted by
Tedgrrrr
Wait - I forgot to mention two important facts. Not disagreeing with you but these may be important facts. I initially had a confirmed seat in C+ on the first flight (LGA to Boston) - let's call it DL 999 (made up flight). I
was #1 of maybe 20 on the upgrade list for DL 999. My inbound flight was delayed, and so I used Facebook to SDC to the later flight - mind you, this was only 90 minutes before DL 999 was scheduled to leave. By the time my inbound flight landed, I ran to the gate and saw that DL 999 had been delayed by about 30 minutes.
The gate agent refused to let me SDC (despite one C+ being available) and put me on the standby list, suddenly
I'm #8 on the standby list for DL 999... I get that the standby list and the upgrade list are different, and also, I don't know my fare class but I paid about $100 for C+, so definitely a low fare class - thoughts?
This is pretty easy to explain. Any confirmed passenger without a seat assignment will always show above you on the standby list (since you are non-confirmed). So this could have been any of the 8 passengers. You may have been the first non-confirmed pax on the flight.
While the above is the most likely case, since your flight was delayed can guarantee you that this flight likely had a lot of SDS from people arriving early and seeing they had the opportunity to get on an earlier flight - some of which may have been Diamonds. You may have been
#1 on the upgrade list, but not that high in the pecking order all things considered because 6-7 people cleared their F upgrade before it got to the gate (hypothetically).