Even if you love EUA, consider sending CO a note to make it better.

In my experience as a Platinum Elite (with only a 60% YTD upgrade success rate) EUA has not worked as advertised. Time and again I have been able to confirm availability both before and after an EUA run, but somehow my reservation was not upgraded. Even with my "spoonful of sugar" approach, I have not always been successful in obtaining upgrades even when seats are still available at the time I call and were available the night before. The agents typically indicate that they have been ordered to wait until EUA runs again and are unable to process the upgrade manually.

Here lies the problem: agents do not actually know if a specific reservation was examined by EUA to see if it was eligible for an upgrade. However, passengers are expected to take on blind faith that the system worked and that upgrades were simply not eligible. After discussing this at length this evening with a CO supervisor, (currently trying to get a NW upgrade on a CO ticket) I suggested my fix (below) and she said that it sounded great, but that I would have to get other CO FFs to write in to get CO's attention.

The fix - and where you come in: CO can allow their agents to provide accurate information and identify EUA problems in a relatively simple procedure. EUA already updates the PNR when an upgrade was processed, on the other side of the coin it should also update the PNR when it processes the EUA cycle and the upgrade is not available. That way, when the passengers call to check, the agent can intelligently say "Yes, EUA ran on this reservation at 2:03 am, but it was unable to process an upgrade at the time." The agent is then empowered to provide accurate information AND if a reservation was actually missed, the agent can solve the problem (upgrade manually) and forward the record to CO's information tech department to identify the reason that EUA failed on that particular reservation.

Regardless of your feelings about EUA, this "fix" can only make it better. I hope that you can take a few minutes (feel free to cut and paste the text) to help CO develop a system to provide their agents and passengers better information.

Thanks -
CWPFLY