Botched upgrade processing out of AMS?
This isn't a complaint (despite some low-level general griping), but I'm a bit confused about what went down here:
Flying out of AMS on United generally seems to be a bit of mess (and now no lounge access for *G in the non-Schengen area apparently, grr), but I flew AMS-IAH yesterday in economy, and someone seems to have really biffed on the upgrades. I put in a GPU for the flight, but only had a W fare, and so fully expected to not get upgraded on the last day of Thanksgiving weekend. Sure enough, I was pretty far down the list out of something like 15 people on the waitlist. However, I kept checking the app out of curiosity, and when the doors finally closed, the upgrade list showed "Capacity: 50, Booked: Full, Checked-in: 46" with four seats unclaimed on the seat map. I thought that might be a glitch in the app, but I did a quick reconnaissance mission into Polaris during a slow part of the flight when the FAs were clustered in the kitchen, and saw that two of the seats were indeed empty (all four might have been, but I only looked at the close and obvious ones, since I didn't want to be sticking my neb into anyone's actual occupied seat).
So, what happened? The flight started boarding only about 10 minutes late, so it wasn't like there was an absolute crunch in time. Was this on the contracted ground staff? On an IT glitch? Any guesses or experience with something similar?