Originally Posted by
lucasec
This is what the gate agent told me. I think what she was going to have to do was cancel my EGE ticket, book a new DEN ticket for a flight later in the evening with open seats, then add me to the standby for the earlier flight. I assume this is a limitation of the system and pretty much no way around it. Also, if I got to DEN, that would now be my final destination so no option to standby if there was a flight to EGE I assume.
There are precious few situations where DEN-EGE would be operating if SFO-EGE is not — but this week at SFO might well have been among those. That said, the only way to keep a ticket to EGE while trying this would have been to get rebooked onto a SFO-DEN-EGE with confirmed seats; then you could standby for an earlier SFO-DEN, and then you could standby for an earlier DEN-EGE, if any, or could abort the trip if DEN-EGE were canceled or significantly delayed.
As you rightly intuit, if you accepted a standby just to DEN, that would have made it very challenging to get to EGE upon arrival at DEN. You might still be able to get someone to do it — if they look at the history, they can see that you originally had an EGE ticket — but I wouldn’t bet on it.