Asia Miles bogus upgrade waitlist
 

My flight CX885 LAX to HKG upgrade was unavailable upon booking so they said to add to waitlist and once it opened up id be automatically confirmed. Other agents then said oh you should keep calling instead of waitlisting. So I waitlisted and kept checking EF and saw several J seats open. Called today to check and the agent said you are on waitlist and will be SMS notification when available. After I asked her to check other dates. She said oh actually your flight has upgrades available and processed the upgrade. What the heck? What is the point of a waitlist then?

are you sure it just wasn't people with higher elite status? CX has three levels of waiting list..."highest priority", "high priority" (sometimes just called "priority") and "normal priority" (sometimes just called "normal" or "standard" waitlist). Diamonds have highest priority, while Golds get high priority. I'm not sure about Silvers. But other OW status doesn't count, no matter what they tell you on the phone.

I'm not saying you're wrong, indeed many years ago I had the waitlist fail on me twice in short order. How did I know? Because I saw F seats I was waitlisting for on the British Airways website. But I haven't seen this situation in years. And I think it would be hard to figure out unless you were on the highest priority waiting list.

My perception is that waitlists have never automatically cleared. Being on a waitlist is essentially an "expression of interest". To make the upgrade happen you need to keep calling and asking. Diamonds excepted.

I've probably had 6-7 waitlist clear in the last 12 months. 1-2 failed. Granted I am DM. But the system has worked quite well for me recently and I'd be really surprised if anyone below DM doesn't get a real waiting list. I just don't see the point in them designing a system that fails at what it is supposed to do for everyone else, but succeeds for DMs.

My point about the agent is to say, perhaps it was a DM or two who were cleared ahead of you. And that's why your clearance didn't come through.

The OP's point is that when he called then upgrades were available to him. That being so if the "waitlist" is to have any meaning then it should have cleared already since he was on the waitlist. It hadn't cleared until he called. It seems that the waitlist is more or less meaningless for sub-Diamonds.

Or maybe "calling now" has higher priority than "being on the waitlist from a call weeks/months ago"?

Folks, I'm sorry I didn't understand the OPs meaning until now. Upon further reading, I agree this doesn't make sense. Foolish on CXs part .Sorry about the confusion!

I agree with this.

I have had waitlist automatically cleared before (as SL or GO), so I wouldn't go completely saying that the waitlist never automatically clears.

Same here, and SL as of a few months ago.

Well the delay would have sucked because I was only a day away from the deadline for waitlist.

I have read somewhere on these forums that the wait-list only clears once per day at a set time. If availability comes up in the meantime it is possible to call and book it, essentially jumping the wait-list line.

I had a waitlist on an upgrade last December that got cleared automatically about 4 hours AFTER the deadline. I was given another day to ticket.

Allegedly with the MPC change in June they also had a system upgrade that would fix that problem. I haven't redeemed since then so no DP to provide.