You were misinformed by the phone agent. Since your flight cancelled, if you'd shown up at the airport, they would have let you standby for anything you wanted.

Also, it's possible that not only was the phone agent misinformed on the standby policy, but since you couldn't be accommodated for a week, it's likely the agent was looking for reward space, not just open space, to rebook you. You should have been rebooked into any open space that was available, regardless of whether reward space was open.

I think what we're hearing falls into two distinct areas:

1) Continental's Protection performance last weekend. Some people seemed to be pretty well protected and got put on flights the next day. Others either weren't automatically protected or, because of full flights, were protected for flights 3 or 4 days after their cancelled flights. This caused huge problems for some.

2) What should be Continental's Protection Policy for Elites re: bumping non-elites? This is obviously a difficult question and can be argued several ways. No one wants to cause problems for the inoccent non-elite who's flight goes out on time the next day. No one would think that if their baseball game is cancelled due to rain that their ticket would be good the next day for the same seat. But it's the way of the world that exceptions are made for VIPs and good customers. If I have scheduled a meeting for my most important client for tomorrow and they couldn't make it because of weather, I probably wouldn't think too much about rescheduling a less important client so that I could accomodate the important client the next day. After all, as someone said in an earlier post, CO will bump people to give a seat to a platinum on a full Y push, and they also bump albeit with compensation when overbooked. So why should an elite have to sit 3 or 4 days without a flight when others by the luck of the drawer have flights? I don't know the answer -- I think it's worth some discussion.

There are two issues here, that I think need to be isolated for this discussion:

Rebooking and Standby:

CO actually does a good job at rebooking. When your flight is cancelled, the computer auto-rebooks people on the next flights with space. I've had this happen to me many times, and it gives you the next possible flights with space, automatically. The part where they screw up is in notification -- TripAlert doesn't always tell you about this, but you will find out when you get to the airport.

And of course, it's a computer doing it, so it's programmed to put you on the next possible flight or flights with space to your final destination. It doesn't take into account things like alternate airports, or earlier fligihts (e.g., if there's a flight 7:00 and 9:00, and your flight at 7:15 cancels, it will put you on the 9:00, despite likely being able to get to the airport 15 minutes earlier for the 7:00).

But the rebooking process is handled by status. I've seen multiple people get different flights based on their status if their flight is cancelled.

btw, the above rebooking procedures do apply to misconnects (or possible misconnects) -- CO's system will put in flights for you when it looks like you're not going to make your connection. If you make the connection, these new protected flights fall off.

What happened to a lot of people in this last EWR snowstorm was they were rebooked in order of when their flight cancelled. Someone on the 7:00 a.m. SFO-EWR that got cancelled would be booked on the next flight with space (say the 10:00 p.m. redeye). However, when they cancelled the next few flights, there was no space until later the next day. Meanwhile, say the redeye now cancels, this person may not go out for another couple days. So part of it is just dumb luck. It's processing according to the priority, based on when your flight is cancelled. So it is possible that if two flights cancel, the person whose flight cancelled first would be reaccommodated before the person whose flight cancelled afterwards.

The Standby issue, as we all know, is where CO fails miserably. They're taking steps to fix that, and once that's in place, they will be in line with the other carriers, so that won't be an issue.

But for this discussion, I think most people were handled with the rebooking process, and the only people who may have gotten shafted by the lousy standby process were people who wanted to go before their rebooked flight and tried to go standby at the airport.

tincan used the term "standby" in his post (#3 in thread), but I think what he is actually trying to say "waitlist". He was protected on a flight a week later (probably because everything from then to a week later are fully booked), and they wouldn't put him on waitlist for any earlier flight.

There's also also quite a bit of miscommunication between him and the phone agent too, and that PA probably didn't do a good job explaining.

tincan could probably still standby, but he has to hang out at the airport. Not by doing it on the phone.

Hypothetically - due to weather, 20 of a weekend's 30 flights are cancelled.

Who gets the seats on the 10 remaining flights? Status pax, or those lucky enough to have reservations for those flight-numbers?

Answer: whatever's the least cost to the airline.