Originally Posted by dmodemd
Yes you can! And this is a very useful trick! I needed to visit a friend in SFO for the day but the cost for putting in a full day stopover was too high. So I booked a later flight with a standard connection. Then the day of, I took a standby for an early AM flight but left my red-eye out of SFO alone. I checked availability the day before and saw the first flight out was wide open (although early), so I didnt even bother doing a confirmed. I did OLCI the night before for my original flights and walked up to the gate of the flight I wanted and they gave me a seat 45 mins out, since the plane was half full.
I was worried this might invalidate my evening flight for some reason but it didn't... HOWEVER one catch!!:
If you do OLCI and you standby successfully for another flight it will CANCEL your check in on the later flight. You need to RE-CHECK in. I didnt and when sitting at the gate for my oversold red-eye they called my name... when I came up they said "Oh! You ARE here! We were about to give your seat away...". They said they did not show me as checked in although I was holding an OLCI BP...
I don't understand why you did the OLCI 24 hours or so in advance, since your strategy was not to take your originally scheduled flight, but instead to go standby earlier. What could you have accomplished with the OLCI other than set yourself up for screw-up that almost transpired with the red-eye out of SFO you were going to take? I don't mean to be reproachful here, I am just trying to understand what, if anything, might have been served by doing the OLCI as originally booked, then going standby on the first leg of your itinerary. Was it to collect 500 miles for OLCI, something I imagine you could have had by doing OLCI for the red-eye.