I bolded the "she", need to point out that you got major balls let alone trouble.

LOL..... upon boarding, would he be in the back and she be in the front?

Well, yes, that would be the outcome.

But then, that would not make me terribly happy.

Actually, this is the standard situation when I get a revenue ticket, upgrade on the AC transatlantic legs, and end up in Y on a few short legs in Europe. While she uses an award and flies in front all the way.

Occasionally she manages to talk the FA to let me join her though. Usually after the meal. But it's getting harder. We'll see how Aegean is in that respect in a couple of weeks.

In our case, the outcome would have been opposite. My wife always wants me to sit in the front if only one of us has the J seat, especially if it's a longhaul flight. Fortunately, this has never happened. I wouldn't be terribly happy if I was to sit in the front while she is stuck in the back.

well so far I have been happy with the roll out.

Using my points for some upgrades at least now puts my wife and I on more equal footing than before if the upgrade doesn't clear before flight day.

I am not sure if we have clarity on priority for flight day though. I would appreciate it if we could get a definitive answer from Andrew. It would seem logical that all SEs clear then all SE guests then Es then E guests etc. but a previous post seemed to indicate otherwise.

My goal is to always preclear upgrades before flight day but in some case, that doesn't happen . . .

Seems logical... unless you are an E and you don't get an upgrade because an SE upgraded a non-status companion ahead of you. Only thing that's clear to me is that in the upgrade priority game, the degree to which something "seems logical" is generally proportional to how much closer it gets the observer to getting his or her butt in the front cabin.

Hate to sound like a broken record, but most systems have flaws in them. As a post above correctly identified these flaws are more or less severe depending on the degree to which one is personally affected. Right now, I'm fairly happy with the system overall, but tend to fly only on M-class flight passes and paid long-haul J (e.g., based on my experiences to date I suspect the current system was designed for people with my purchasing behaviour).

Are there frustrations? Yes, for instance, I was waitlisted on a flight to BOS last night for 4 days despite the fact that there J > 5 on a 9 seat plane. Even last night when I flew I was waitlisted until about 4 minutes before I got on the plane, only to find that there were still 3/9 empty J seats. Big problem? No. Annoying? Yes.

Anyway, in my opinion, the current system is better than the previous system for the following reasons:

1.) Increased ease of upgrade and upgrade management
2.) Better transparency over upgrades (maybe its just because I can control the system online)
3.) Increased number of upgrades for me personally
4.) Decreased number of people in J class as a whole
5.) Increased flexibility in use of upgrades -- at my current pace of flying and purchasing I will be hard-pressed to burn all my credits, as will many on this board I suspect. Being able to upgrade family members and not waste credits is actually a huge benefit now for me personally.

Is the system perfect? No. Does it work essentially as we were promised it would work? Yes.

"Seems logical... unless you are an E"

True but what is the pecking order. Should a SE guest have priority over a Prestige member. Should a SE guest that is a Prestige member have priority over a Prestige member?

Lots of combos to think about. Keep it simple seems to work best. I can live with SE, E, P, SE guest, E guest, P guest but inquiring minds need to know.

Under the old system, I know that I trumped the significant other of another SE. Flying FRA->YYC a last december, I got the last upgrade on the flight. The guy just before me was trying to get his wife/companion upgraded, but since she didn't have status it was no go.

I know that I would have been rather dissapointed had she been upgraded, leaving me in the back.

In the end, she spent most of the time up front, while he was in back.

"Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug"

- Dire Straits

Wouldn't this be a great situation for the AC team on the board to look into the flight, look at what went wrong with the system, and report back to give everyone some assurance that "we're going to work the bugs out" is really sincere?

Seriously. It would be a good move. I'm sure the OP would be pleased to share the flight details with Andrew or someone.

I am not just a little annoyed with Andrew for failing to make it clear in the first place, nor clarifying it now.

Andrew. We want to know the rules so we can play by them. I also want my six upgrade credits back i wasted on a yow yyz leg this week.

I guess I'm down on the system precisely because it makes more difficult the use of credits by two people on the same PNR who each have their own bank of credits. The old system with the certs made that easy. It seems to me that there has to be a solution to this that doesn't involve complex machinations.

On our YUL-YYZ-YQR flights last weekend we had all sorts of uncertainty due to the complexity of this problem where the old system would have made it easy. We decided after dropping our bags off that we would try to upgrade both flights as my wife was feeling ill (we especially wanted the latter segment). YYZ-YQR was J3/R2, so we should have been able to clear, and YUL-YYZ was J9/R1, so chances were good. At the ticketing desk we were told that it was not possible to be upgraded or added to the list AFTER check in has been completed. To her credit, the agent did some asking about this after we left the desk as by the time we got to the MLL the agent there had a message for us that it could be done and was being done after lots of consultation had happened. We needed to get the process completed at the gate in YUL.

At the gate, the agent clears us and gives us J BPs, but we do not know if we are in J on the second leg (why waste credits for a short hop only?), and no way of knowing whether the credits were taken from each of our separate accounts as we had requested. We clear in YYZ too, and all is well. At home the next day, I check my credits and see that new PNR had been created for me and that 6 credits were used from my account, and presumably 6 from my wife's. It all worked, but a mini army of AC employees appeared to have worked on that to make it function. Kudos to them, but this is not simplified airport management of upgrades and if you don't amenable agents you are likely to be screwed. And no, booking separately is not a reasonable answer in my view as there are advantages to being on one PNR.

This can be done better, I think, and it needs to be. I hated the uncertainty and actually wished that I had simply bought the upgrade at OLCI as offered.

I am coming up to a long haul flight with my wife and I have enough ecredits to upgrade us both. From the preceding discussion, however, it looks like this is going to be problematic. At T-4, what happens if, say, R=2 and I am first in line - do both clear? If the request is waitlisted, and there are a mix of Es and SEs, how does AC handle it if (when) they clear the list ahead of of time and I am still "first" on the list? I assume the SEs clear first, but what happens when they come to my request and there are more requests than seats - if my own clears , I cannot refuse it without "paying" to get my Y seat back, and it won't be the seat I had, ie, next to my wife.

As has been pointed out in this thread, a little clarity on how to handle this pretty common situation would be very helpful!

Can we please move away from bashing Andrew? Frankly I'm surprised that he agreed to stay with the board after the fiasco in December.

He is not the creator of the e-upgrade program. He is a social media ambassador for the airline and he could just as easy tell FT members to pound sand if we continue to engage in personal attacks.