Good SDC experience
 

I want to start by saying that the agents definitely bent the rules on this one, so it's not something I'd expect every time.

I was booked on PDX-OAK at 7am tomorrow (cheapest flight of the day). I wanted to change to PDX-SFO at 10pm on an E175. Unfortunately it was F5 U1 Y0 (U1 inside 2 days on PDX-SFO?? I guess the elites fly early). The agent saw that F was wide open so put me on hold. The supervisor approved the oversell and they moved me to that flight, and of course I was immediately upgraded. The agent even apologized for the long hold time (10 min to get it approved and then another 10 min for the rate desk to get it done). Of course I told her that I understood they were bending a rule for me and I thanked her profusely.

When I went to select my F seat only 1A was gone... the rest of the cabin was available. Definitely not what I'd expect on a Y0 flight from PDX.

As I have said on numerous occasions an Airline is more than the aircraft they fly!

I am on error #5 for an AA award booked 2 months ago and still not properly ticketed.

James

For all the moaning and groaning I read on FT, my experiences with Alaska have been remarkably positive.
It's kind of like flying Continental, back in 2002-era, when most things were still great.

I would say that my experience with AS agents (particularly phone agents) has been uniformly positive

I did an SDC from 8am SFO-EWR to 11PM flight. Woke up to an email saying I was upgraded only to find out that my upgrade cleared for the 8am flight. Looks like i was still on the Upgrade List on the morning flight. Not sure how this happened. But I called in and the agent said she sees that I am on the upgrade list for the 11pm flight. only 2 F seats open right now and I see more than 9 people on the waitlists who were upgraded to premium class. Not sure how unlucky I am on this one....

This happens ~50% of the time for me with SDCs. Phone agents can't do anything about it--I have tried at least a dozen times. They will say you are on the upgrade list, but if you aren't showing up on your app, it likely means you are still on the previous flight and therefore the app is erroring out. The phone agents don't see this.

The best solution I found is talking to a knowledgable curbside check-in agent. They have consistently fixed this for me by completely removing and readding my ticket to the local airport ticketing system. I had to deal with this last week. The curbside agent confirmed there was an error and even though the "summary page" (which he said phone agents go off of) showed me as "waitlisted for first class", the underlying system did not have me the upgrade list. He said it is rare and he sees it 1-2 times a month, but if its not fixed, you will be skipped by the upgrade processor because of the underlying conflict. He also confirmed that if I hadn't had him fix the issue, Others would have been upgraded and I would have been SOL. That is the key difference I've tried to explain to phone agents many times, but have given up on them comprehending.

Had this problem yesterday; was fixed over SMS

Well, Now I have finally realized that I was never on the waitlist and they upgraded 3 other people... feeling really bummed out...

How does SDC word with connection flights?
FLL-SEA-SFO -----> [SDC] -------> FLL-LAX-SFO
is this possible?