SFO has been a total mess today and I've been sitting here since 9 AM trying to get on a flight to Eagle, Colorado. My original flight is sitting at 5 hours delayed, still waiting on an inbound plane from Idaho that the crew at the gate told me hasn't even boarded yet.

After hour 5, I got nervous whether this flight is going to happen at all, so I looked to see if I can standby on a flight to DEN to at least be in driving distance of my destination. I talked to a gate agent for the next DEN flight who told me she couldn't do it without rebooking the whole ticket, as my original ticket is to EGE. And her flight was overbooked with another already 6 on the standby list. That felt too risky to give up the first ticket without a confirmed seat. I tried the Premier desk to see if there was any way they could re-jigger the reservation, but the agent just gave me a lecture on how "your flight is still scheduled, you should trust us and be patient".

Curious if anyone else has had this situation and had an agent be able to creatively solve it with any of these scenarios (and if so, what level of agent did it take, e.g. 1K desk, United club help desk, etc.):

• Direct flight standby to another airport near the destination
• Direct flight change or SDC to flight with one or more hops
• Direct flight standby to another airport near the destination, then standby at that airport for another flight to the original destination