<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by venk:
I was told that on the day of travel, A will not be released to F without running EUA and that agents will not upgrade to available A upon check-in.
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which makes no sense as written because even if EUA uses the F bucket, it makes no sense to run it when seats have not been released to F and even if you run it right after releasing it to F, then the agents will have to be told not to use up any of the F seats (not A seats) while it is running and that the automatic check-in kiosks don't upgrade at the time that it is still running and has not allocated all the seats.
Either you have miswritten what she said or she has no idea of what she is talking about.
[This message has been edited by venk (edited 04-04-2002).]
I think what she said was not properly worded. The fact is that seats are released to F and that EUA runs after this. The fact is that, as always, agents will no upgrade people out of A inventory. There is, however, a period of time between when seats are released and when upgrades occur. This is the time from approx 3.5 hours before departure to 3 hours before departure. I think it is reasonable to assume that it is possible for someone (eg. a sliver) to obtain an upgrade during this time from an emachine or from an agent. This loophole is much better than the airport free-for-all loophole, but it is still a loophole.
Hopefully, the chances of this are fairly low. Most people do not arrive at the airport >3 hours before departure. There is some risk of connecting people, particularly those on flights ~1 hour who get to the airport ~1 hour before departure, to get upgrades. This is probably not very common. And, of course, there is the possibility that that some savvy silvers with time to spare and really strong desire to sit in F, to get to the airport 3.5 hours before their flight and use the emachine to check-in and "steal" an upgrade. If CO develops web check-in like nwa, this problem becomes greater.
It's really amazing how unsophisticated this system is. I would be interested to know if the limitations are a result of the system, it's programmers, or the people telling them what to program.