What's Up with EUA?
 

I am flying on CO1800 on Wed. and a friend is on CO1701 on Tue. We both are Gold Elite and weren't upgraded...despite there being about 10 seats left in F. What's wrong with EUA?

Just because you didn't get upgraded at your window doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the EUA process. The number of seats open in F doesn't have anything to do with how many seats they release into the bucket for upgrades. Perhaps they have historical data that suggests there may be last minute buyers for those F seats.

To see if there's any seats available for EUA, try searching for reward upgrade seats on the flights you're looking for. They come out of the same bucket. You have to do it shortly before the EUA window because revenue management sometimes tinkers with the numbers around EUA time (or so I've heard).

This used to be reliable - but my experience over the last 20 segments in the past 6 weeks is that R can be available and EUA does not occur.

CO Insider has reported that EUA freezes if someone in the queue has a problem reservation. I have seen flights with 16 out of 20 F seats empty (and you can check that for real 2 days out on the PDA site) and R available and no EUA's until either 24 hours before flight time or at battlefield at the gate for all those.

I saw it too with a trip to MCO two weeks ago. If the bucket is 0 though, you'll at least know there's no shot.

Agree - if R is 0 - no upgrade coming. This is reliable.

If used to be that if R was available just before EUA - the number of R bucket seats would clear. If say only one R seat available before EUA, and one person clears, then R will go to zero.

CO might add another R seat the next day, but it usually takes overnight.

To determine the number of R seats - go through the booking process as described and keep redoing by incrementing the number of passengers.

In the "freeze" situation - I have seen 8 R seats available just before EUA. 8 is the highest number of seats you can book in one record on co.com.

Reward travel is available in F for both flights.

I don't understand how you do that. You can't book R fare through co.com since its a reward and upgrade fare. I can't use tools like KVS because I have a mac...

I've been one of the bigest complainers about the programming issues with the EUA process. Funny, but we've each gotten two EUA's at the 5 day mark in the last week.

I don't think it's fixed yet.

It's the reward UPGRADE bucket, not the reward seat. There is a difference. To find it, go to the co.com reservation page and click advanced search. Scroll down, check the box for OnePass Reward Upgrade and click search. It will ask you which flights you want to search for upgrade available seats. Once you've confirmed that there is at least one seat, you can adjust the number of seats to see how many there are. As cova pointed out, there have been some bugs lately so it's not an exact science at present.

EUA still works (sometimes). Yes I have many times gotten EUA in the last month at the 5 day mark or 4 day mark. But when someone has a problem reservation - EUA freezes. Looks like your two 5 day EUA's did not have the freeze problem.

Out of my 20 upgradeable segments in the past 6 weeks, I would say about 30% of them had the freeze problem. Freeze issue means that R bucket is wide open both before and after EUA, but no one gets EUA - and it did not appear that CO was manipulating the R bucket at EUA time.

I've had many flights clear at the 5 day mark, and also had them clear at the gate as a Platinum, so it varies readily right now...

Curious if the new information being requested is what is holding things up... such as if a person doesn't say what kind of ID type they are using, will that hold up the EUA process due to that?

Don't get too annoyed at that...KVS doesn't show CO's R bucket anyways.

what is a "problem reservation"?:confused:

Those booked by FT'ers. :D

I remember seeing a thread or two wherein CO Insider mentioned this, but I don't remember any detailed description of a "problem reservation". To hazard a guess: EUA logic looks for elite level, fare class, booking date/time, and check in time (starting at T-24) to decide the fate of a reservation (oh I forgot FT handle :p) ... so it could be a problem with any of those--or some other internal data that we know nothing about.