I’m booked on CO 340, AUS-IAH, on 2/19. Yesterday afternoon, the flight showed 3 seats in the R bucket. This morning there were still 3 seats in the R bucket; no EUA. Being within the 5 day window for my Plat upgrade, I was concerned that there was something wrong with my record preventing the EUA from being processed. After a long discussion with an Elite Desk supervisor, we discovered that the EUA process had not been run for that flight. I was under the impression that rev mgmt controlled upgrades by releasing and withdrawing seats in the R bucket, and that the EUA ran every night for all the flights. Is there any pattern to when the EUA process is actually run and when it starts?

I certainly don’t mind CO holding back FC seats in the hope of selling them, but I am a little disturbed to discover that CO is holding back reward seats for mileage upgrades over Elite upgrades.

from most of my flights in Jan/Feb seems they run it a few hours before flight time, UNLESS you are on a flight where they generally dont sell the 1st Class cabin, where it will run as stated 5/3/1 day/s out

On the flights I've been on where they expect to sell out they don't usually have *any* R availability showing.

EUA is supposed to run nightly. There have been several cases where R is released, and EUA does not run and upgrades are given to Elites first-come first-served at checkin.

I'm not sure what stalls EUA, but I personally believe I stalled it once with an out-of-sync record. I was watching it not run every night, had my record fixed, and it ran no problem.

You should puruse this issue with the OnePass folks. YGM.

I might be completely wrong on this, but I thought someone posted a while back that the CO EUA system will soon operate more like the NWA system, ie, run several times throughout the day at opposed to midnights + T-3 hours.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this is done ,or when they choose to run EUA or not. It seems a safe bet to assume that this is how they wish for that to be and in its current format will not be transparent by design.I can really only make educated guesses at best from data I gleam from looking at the available buckets,seat charts,and rules they have given us for each elite tier.When all is said and done their lack of tranparency keeps their revenue management in the driver seat and me guessing about how many seats are available,when ,why,record problems,and all these bucket questions.
I do sometimes get an upgrade at the 5 day window and really have no clue why. I also get a fair share at the gate and some battlefield ups on the plane. I like these the least as I have to find my carry on, move it and don't care for everyone looking at me.
The most important things I look for when making a reservation are the following;
1)Aircraft (no jungle jets and always pick a flt with the biggest FC cabin)
2)Some routes will always be a crapshoot (transcons ,Iah -EWR/SFO/LAX/Calgary so I follow step one above and hope for the best
or use miles from the get go to upgrade hard routes
3)When booking I try to book a higher fare class than X or U so my upgrade chance is better
4) when relying on a EUA that has not come through I make sure to check in on line at the minute the 24 Hour before flight check-in becomes available so I am on the top of the waiting list ( I hope ,but this too is not transparent)
5) I try to get to the gate early if not EUA'D and chat up the Gate Agent

How do you see where the 'R' inventory is? Thanks!

I can confirm that EUA is no longer running only right after midnight. My last three upgrades have happened at odd hours of the day, like around 4:00 PM, 8:00 PM, and 11:00 AM. None of these were on the day of the flight -- usually 2-3 days before departure.

I've noticed that the EUA process seems to be running at a different time than before. Since the beginning of the year, I've received my EUAs around 10:00 PM CST. Before they seemed to come through just after midnight. The CSR supervisor said that the cut-off time for booking to make the EUA run for that day is 6:00 PM CST, so that implies to me that the process is running not too long after that.

As Channa pointed out, maybe a bad record stalled the run for my flight. I will certainly pursue the matter with OnePass. Kind of disheartening to find out that the EUA process is not as cut and dried as CO leads me to believe. Again, if CO wants to hold the FC seats back in order to sell them, more power to them. But I've always been told by CO that if the R seats are there they're available for upgrades during your window, and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

As I understand it check-in time is only a tiebreaker amongst a fare class. An H will trump an L no matter that the H checked in an hour ago and the L at 23:59 prior.

So theoretically important but I bet, at least on the lower fare classes, mostly meaningless.

Got an EUA for Monday's IAH-DEN flight at 8:14:15 PM CST tonight.

Bucket and upgrade-mode jargon aside, in my experience in the past year, the most common time for an upgrade is about 3 hours before the flight. I know this because I forward the CO upgrade email alerts to my cell phone, which makes a special sound when they arrives.

For a 752 (BF seating) IAH to SFO last night, I got my EAU about 5 days out, planning to give it to my wife. Checking in for our first leg at JAX, I made sure to put her on the companion upgrade list for the IAH to SFO leg. This was about 6 hours out, and the upgrade cleared immediately, so we both got the best seats in the domestic system.

Others can supply appropriate jargon here, but this was exactly the outcome I expected. A Plat companion upgrade is normally a catch-22, because one seldom checks in more than three hours in advance, at which time Golds will already have been upgraded into the available slots, leaving the companion only with battlefield upgrade prospects. However, on trips with connections, one can play it as we did, snagging the companion upgrade.

I'd separate unnecessary worrying about upgrades from tactics. Worrying is pointless. The above tactic, however, is generally effective; if one lived close enough to the airport it could be actually worth a separate trip that day to check in, to snag a transcon companion upgrade.

I flew from EWR to IAH two saturdays ago and it seemed that no R seats were released until the day before. I was not near a computer most of the day so I couldn't check in earlier, but miraculously there were 4 seats in R when I actually did check in. I really wish that the process that releases the R seats would be immediately followed by the EUA process... unless someone has to manually release the R seats, but that doesn't make much sense to me.

It does occasionally run during the day. I have found 85% of my EUA's running overnight (when there is less demand on comnputer time) and the balance at various times including morning and afteroon, and a couple of times, while I was on my way to the airport.

EUA should be run trhoughout the day. Otherwise, as inventory is added to the R bucket during the day it can get plucked off before EUA is run, allocating seats as ordered by the system.

I'm not even sure they run EUA's FLL-EWR. I was scheduled to return from FLL tomorrow on the 8:30am CO# 1000 flight. As a Plat, I dutifully checked in this am at 8:38 (I had not received my EUA at 5-3 or 1 --obviously).I then called CO & asked about F availability was told that it looked good as there were still 7 F seats open . A bit later in the am today, a sudden change in plans occured and I now wanted to return today. I called CO, and was told that I could make the change for a $30 fee, and she would put me on the upgrade list for today's 5:00pm CO #1800 (it was 1pm). Again, I was told should be no problem as on the 752 there were still 10 Fseats--also as this was a Sun in the middle of a 3 day weekend, coach was only 1/2 full. Well, as it turned out CO had some mechanical problems on their 2:50pm flight, and thus had to rebook everyone on that earlier flight, so no F for me (a Platinum). No big deal, I had a nice exit row aisle seat. But my concern is that on both flights where there were obviously F seats available, not only no EUA (on the original flight), but no upgrade on day of flight when I was rebooked Is CO only doing upgrades at the gate on these flights??