Your quest for martyrdom loses my sympathy right there.

For a Saturday morning flight?!

OP cannot confirm or not confirm this observation.

This thread keeps on veerying onto various topics related to LMUs and upgrades but I think the crux of what was raised is still valid and has not been answered by anyone.

Specifically, in the original thread when LMUs were introduced and there were a whole bunch of questions Andrew stated on June 6, 2009:
The bolded part is where I believe the general FT understanding that AC will clear R class (then known as I class) before offering LMUs came from.

Now, the OP has provided pretty conclusive proof that LMUs were offered on his flight prior to u/g list space being cleared. I think that whether or not he ultimately would have been u/g'ed is not the whole point. The fact is that if LMUs are being offered prior to u/g list being cleared then that is likely to 1) decrease the chance of a successful u/g to some extent and therefore further diluting benefits and 2) may add a certain "element of stress" as I am sure we all prefer to be u/g prior to OLCI as opposed to at the gate 20 minutes before takeoff - this of course assumes that AC is holding J space pending OLCIs that it otherwise would have given confirmed u/g, fact is we don't really know.

So I think what many of us want is simply a clarification. Was Andrew wrong? Was he right at the time and has the situation changed? Or is what Andrew stated true but there is a bug in the system? Or is it something else entirely - did we misinterpret Andrew's statement? Looking at Andrew's statement one could also see that the general FT community may have missinterpreted what he said. It seems that many here think that Andrew's statement means that essentially upgrade requests are supposed to trump LMUs, where in fact if you read Andrew's statement carefully all he said is that LMUs will not eat into R space. So for example if a flight is R=3 and someone purchases an LMU it will not become R=2. What Andrew did not say was that when R=0 and people are on the waitlist LMUs will not be offered.



Despite all the directions this threat has gone, I think a clarification re: the above is what a lot of us are looking for.

AClover

Air Canada is definitely not being transparent with the upgrade process. My partner (Elite) was waitlisted for an upgrade from SCL to YYZ. When he got to the airport he asked the agent about his chances. She said that chances weren't that good but she gave him the option to buy a LMU for 800$. Because he was travelling all the way to LHR he accepted it. The worst part is that she didn't remove the upgrade request from the reservation. Consequently, because he ended up flying in C, his credits (17) were never returned to his account.

Actually, AY directly addressed this question when I posted it a while back, as I've posted earlier here, From this thread:

There is no "general understanding", it's what's presented as facts by an official AC rep!

Well there you go. Thanks for posting this. Then this stil leaves the question, was Andrew wrong, have things changed since, or is it simply a matter of bugs in the system?

AClover

As previously mentioned, it could be none of the above.

We have to clarify that when Andrew quoted that it was when we had paper certs and now that we uave eupgrades I would expect the same theorem to hold but the intro of eupgrades means IT changes and if these changes were not tested thorougly it can develop a glitch.

Yea, I guess AClover forgot to include "Act of God" in the possible causes. :rolleyes:

I think this case is worst as OP's one ! They had to return him either his credit or his 800$ !

I for one, am disappointed that OP withdrew his upgrade request. Without the final outcome on the upgrade being denied/granted, we don't have enough information to ask AC for clarification.

If AC was going to clarify it, they should have done so already. :(

But are you surprised? It seems like their staff bends the rules all the time....... You can ask five agents with five different answers......so why surprised if staff @ the yield management department/operations pulled the LMU/eupgrade into five different directions instead of following the guidelines......

that is my thought......

+1