Cheap upgrades... REALLY cheap!
 

Just booked a flight on CO metal for ORD-SFO next monday night. When i was looking at seats, i decided to see how much the upgrade would cost for first (even though there was only one seat taken, so odds of getting the comp as Platinum are quite high).

Thought it must have been a typo - said $3 for first confirmed.

So i went ahead and booked, thinking it would give me the right pricing at some point... but i guess that $3 IS the right price :D

Just a quick FYI - always check the first upgrade price as it appears that sometimes you can score a cheap confirmation.... ^

Welcome to the world of TOD (Tens of Dollars) upgrades, they're famous on CO ;)

Question for you - what's your fare basis? I see you are a MM, so are you CO Gold, or Plat (I think Plat as you reference it)? That will help diagnose if it's a legitimate buy-up offer (to an M fare if Plat, or a B fare if Gold), or some of the shady dealings that have been reported the past few months.

Still, it seems weird that there's only a $3 difference between an M and the next lowest fare (maybe an E, U, or H). Published fare diff between M / U is actually $195 r/t, so something seems fishy.

Wow!!!! That's a TOP (tens of pennies) upgrade! Obviously a website glitch if you're not in a high fare class. Have a great trip.

What was your routing and fare class?

.....Wonderful

If you want to keep the same acronym, it was Tens Of Dimes.

This. It's this kind of stuff that is ridiculous on UA. I don't care how awesome the combined network is and I don't care how awesome E+ is....when the execution of policies are seemingly completely random, it's hard to have any confidence in the published processes...

TOP .... another one for the glossary :D

I just had a similar experience. FWIW, i'm currently Silver, will be Gold after this next flight - this is a Q fare.

Am traveling to IAH-YYC direct in a few weeks, decided to check on what it would costs to upgrade. To my surprise, it was $59 on the IAH-YYC leg - I've flown this route several times this year and it is pretty elite heavy, not to mention a lot of paid F as it is a big oil route. Very surprising, esp. since the flight is still a few weeks out. BTW, the return leg is $260 - flying Friday morning and returning Sunday evening.

One more thing, the return upgrade went up to $668 after I confirmed the $59 on the outbound.

It's not random, it's what happens when you build systems outside your core infrastructure.

SHARES is so bad, CO's architecture model is to build many functions as ancillary systems to SHARES.

So they have a revenue upgrade model which sells cheap upgrades (e.g., the $59 IAH-YYC upgrade we saw upthread). It assumes, however, that all Elites have been upgraded already. In fact, for all we know, pricing may even be dynamic based on inventory, so it sees a wide open F cabin with R wide open, it may choose a lower price.

Problem is, EUA is yet another ancillary system, so if EUA isn't working right (as we've heard here for the past several weeks), then the assumptions used by this other ancill

It's just bad architecture. It works fine when everything works properly. The problem is CO has historically had trouble keeping on top of the many pieces that have to run in conjunction with one another to make things work. They'll fix this bug, it'll be some other bug in a few months, and heck we may even see this return again (as we had before -- the TOD thing had quieted down for a while, and now it's back again due to the EUA issues).

Holy TOD Batman! There's a $400 difference between a one-way Q and B fare. $59 sure is a sweet deal.

Do us a favor and PM your situation to UA Insider. These TODs are getting ridiculous. Not seeing much in the way of denials anymore that they exist....