The published policy includes a big disclaimer - subject to availability
. No airline, whether its CO, NW, UA, US or AA is going to block out its entire FC cabin to accomodate free upgrades when seats can be sold to the market. What happens when they AC has 12FC seats and 18 top tiers waiting for their upgrade? Obviously, someone is going to lose out. You can't please everyone. Only Midwest offers a FC guarantee where everyone is upgraded because the entire AC is FC (saver service excepted).

At the DO, CO stated there are targets it wants to achieve for upgrades at each tier level. Obviously these are not being met for alot of customers, and CO needs to figure out how to better balance its benefits with its need for revenue.

I have to agree with J Edward re: UA. It would cost CO nothing to automatically block the middle seat when a Platinum makes their seat selection. That seat should remain blocked and unavailable until 30 minutes before departure, and can only be assigned at the gate by a gate agent (who must manually unblock it) if it's specifically needed to accomodate customers without seat assignments or standbys - and only if those customers cannot be seated elsewhere.

On the other hand, CO has a stated policy of maximizing as much revenue from each aircraft as possible - so I don't see them introducing an E+ cabin and removing even a single seat from coach if they don't have to. However, I would like to see some research done on improving the seat itself. The coach seats are hard, unflexible, and I find the bottom cushions far too short for comfort. I believe one of the reasons the cushioning and padding of the seat is so thin, is to improve the pitch. A thicker seat would take more room and either reduce pitch to 29-30", or require the removal of some seats to keep it at 30-31".