HKG_Flyer1

So, just had an odd experience and wonder if anyone could enlighten me:

1) Was only pax waitlisted for first class upgrade showing no U inventory, but F2 and three open seats;

2) Woke up this morning and saw upgrade inventory had opened up on Expertly Flyer (U2) with 3 open seats; I was still only pax on waitlist;

3) Confirmed upgrade seats available on Alaskaair.com, which also showed 3 available seats open;

4) Called into 800 number to ask for upgrade to be processed manually, agent seems puzzled, agreed upgrade should have gone through, and calls help desk for assistance;

5) While I'm on hold, I see that all first class inventory is actively zeroed out;

6) Agent returns to tell me that all seats had already been grabbed by other pax higher on the waitlist and/or sold and that no seats are available (but she also seemed bewildered, not entirely convinced);

7) I refresh my online alaskaair.com screen and confirm that I have not been upgraded;

8) I thanked her for her time, but pointed out that no other pax had been on the waitlist, and that I saw the inventory zeroed out while on hold before politely hanging up- she seemed sympathetic, but indicated there was nothing she could do;

9) 5 minutes later (after I've hung up), I receive a notice that my upgrade has cleared into one of the three open F class seats;

10) Checking ExpertFlyer, I now see that all first class fare buckets have now been zeroed out, but that 1 - 2 more seats has been added to certain Y and Z fare class buckets;

11) Checking alaskaair.com, I now see that two seats in first class remain available (minus the one I have cleared into), but F class seats are now longer being offered for sale. Also, the price for economy seats has suddenly dropped from $499 before my call to $268 after my call.

Can anyone explain?

Tracer_SEA

Sounds like a confused/under-trained agent but everything else makes sense

The waitlist in the app only shows people who have checked in, so there can be other people on the waitlist -- and yes, they may be ahead of you

Sounds like the upgrade process ran and assigned the 2 U seats to 2 pax, which then opened up 2 seats in Y and caused a lower fare bucket to open up

AS doesn't always give a seat assignment when the upgrade process runs, so you saw open seats on the seatmap but they were all spoken for

HKG_Flyer1

Ah... got it. Totally makes sense. A couple more questions, if I may:

1) Was the fact that the process occurred while I was on hold coincidental, or do you think the "help desk" manually initiated the flight upgrades?

2) Is the fact that I received a seat five minutes later mean that I was one of the beneficiaries of the upgrade process... and it just lagged by 5 minutes for mysterious computer processing-related reasons?

Tracer_SEA

Total speculation, but yes I think both are likely

I have read here that agents can manually trigger the upgrade engine. No idea why the lag, but if you were using the app it may cache data (whereas the website does not)

steve64

I know that CO had an "issue" (more like "auto abort") during it's auto-upgrade process. If the next PNR to be upgraded for a given flight was out of sync (reserved flights no longer math the e-ticket) then upgrade processing for that flight would stop. The affected PNR would (allegedly) be placed on a queue for Reservations to correct, then the next run of the upgrade process would upgrade that PNR followed by others on the same flight that had been "stuck" behind it.
So my guess is that your flight was getting stuck for some reason ... Held Desk corrected whatever the issue was then manually kicked off the process for your flight.

Sending out e-mails for future flights is very low priority. As an ex TPF mainframe programmer, my guess is that the upgrade processor program doesn't worry about e-mails ... it upgrades and passes info along to other programs or systems. If the e-mails are sent from the mainframe, then they're probably put into a queue. The e-mail processor would only run at times when CPU usage is low, and auto-pauses if CPU usage rises above a certain level. For e-mail, I's be willing to bet that they're actually sent off of the mainframe to another computer for processing.

Seat maps are not an indicator of the count seats sold and even less of an indicator of the count of seats available to sell.
The maps only show seats available for assignment.

HKG_Flyer1

Great stuff. Appreciate the insights!