It seems nearly every Australia-US flight these days is completely booked out and my upgrades never clear.

I am a 1K who does 5-10 transpac returns each year, yet this year I've only been able to use 2 SWUs. Every other flight I have paid for an upgradeable fare but been left in E+.

We frequent flyers put up with a lot of crap on United: poor service, old and poorly maintained planes, bad food, rude staff. The one saving grace was always the upgrades. But now they're not even usable.

Anyone have any advice? Are there better days to fly AUS - US in terms of getting upgraded? Or should I just switch to another airline?