Originally posted by Dudster:
I don't think status matters at all. I was on a CO flight a couple of weeks ago that was running rather late. There was a later flight that was going to leave earlier and I wanted to fly standby on it. Despite having a paid first class ticket and being elite, I was told that I would have to go at the end of the standby list of 30 or so people, including a bunch of people with NW tickets.
My guess is that those people were being reaccommodated from an earlier flight that had had a problem (a Northwest flight having problems in winter? who'd'a thunk it?). People who have already had their plans zapped once are often given priority to minimize the disruption.