Op-UP Handling Changes - One Time Incident or Change in Policy?
 

My international flight out of EWR yesterady was overbooked while BE had quite a few empty seats.
I was hoping to score and upgrade, and being familiar with the EWR protocl I left the GAs to do their job waiting for the concierge to shop up and handle op-ups.
The concierge never showed up and the GA simply booked all the waitlisted passengers into BE.
By the time I aprocahed her she said that they cleared all the necessary Y seats and will not upgared any more passengers.

Is this a one time fluke, or did UA eliminate the concierge from the process (forcing me to turn into a podium lice)?

Happy Travles
DLP

Disclaimer: I do not feel entitled to get an upgrade when I purchase a Y seat and elect not to use my SWUs, but I would like to understand the rules so I could increase my chances

Ok, this is a bit confusing.

Do you mean BF (BusinessFirst)? If so this was a CO flight and CO staff and not a United thing.

United clears upgrades on oversell by status and then if there are no more status passengers then waitlisted people get lucky.

By the sounds of this, this was Continental, and I cannot answer how CO handles OpUps, but UA does not need a concierge to do OpUps, the GAs always do them.

Do you mean the GA cleared those people who waitlisted for upgrade or
those people who waitlisted for seat assignment?

2nd, CO Op-Up by fare class but not status.

1) yes I was referring to BF.
2) the GA upgraded Y passengers with no seat assignment. They were not waitlisted for an upgrade.
3) CO Op ups were handled by a concierge who had a set of rules ( I think they were status based, I was op-upped on deep discount fares). Yesterday the concierge was absent.

DLP

My friend is a CO employee and he told me that Op-Up is based on paid fare and not status.
I will ask him again.

Last summer I was Op-Upped from LHR to IAH and I was on a reward ticket. I was platinum at the time. Surely there were a lot of other higher fares ahead of me! The concierge did tell me that I had been Op-Upped because of the high price of my ticket, which was clearly not the case.

Maybe they just looked at the taxes you paid :p

My personal hope is that the UA mentality survives. OpUps should be done based on status, not fare paid. This is why the EUA/UDU system takes into account status first.

-RM

Same thing here. Two years ago my wife and daughter were given an op-up with me (EWR-DEL), even though they were on reward tix (out of my account of course) and I was on a cheap fare. FWIW, it was the concierge who approached me to deliver the great news. :)

Is this what the BF concierge is supposed to do?

All they've ever done is annoy me and give me bad information.

This seems reasonable given how cumbersome the GA interface is in SHARES.

To process op-ups in any sort of order would have taken significantly more effort and may have delayed the flight.

Getting the flight out on time was probably in the best interest, operationally, hence the operational upgrades went to the most convenient passengers.

No, you are not entitled to an op-up. If the GA wants to put all the non-revs in BF and leave me in Y so be it. Now if UACO starts a phantom upgrade program ala NW, then maybe we can start discussing how it should work.

For those that do not know, the phantom upgrade program was an unpublished benefit in the NW World Perks program. On any WBC NW flight up to five Elites were upgraded from Y ->C based on elite status and then fare class.

I think you're completely missing the point or may have misread the initial post.

The flight was oversold and there were passengers waitlisted for Y seats, but the GA gave them BF (C) seats instead of upgrading Status passengers already on the flight and then putting those waitlisted Y passengers into the Y seats.

I love the way UA handles OpUps, I know my status is worth something to UA in those scenarios, if the new UA is going to go by fare paid and try and reward a 1 time customer in hopes of future revenue they are going to start losing my guaranteed revenue.

IIRC, CO has(had) an internally published protocol for handling these scenarios - and it was to op-up customers by status and fare, but certainly not clear random standbys into BF and leave status pax in the back.

A note to Customer Care is in order. Please publish the flight number here so our Insiders have a chance to view the details and act if they decide it warrants an internal note.

This is one of their roles. In quite a few cases when I aproached the podium to ask about op-ups I was told the concierge will come and process them - guess what, she/he did. When necessary they chased my to my seat and upgraded me after boarding.

Well, this is a CO flight using CO metal, I assume they have experienced little change from December.

CO 079 January 8.

Happy Travels
DLP