Yes, that has been my experience as well. I had an agent quote me the new policy from their knowledge management guide indicating this. There has been reports of some people getting around this, and I encountered one agent a few months back that was definitely “old school” that understood the issue with this policy and reissued. The vast majority however are refusing to reissue until T-24 until departure. Until then you are at the mercy of DL’s computer system kicking you back to whatever cabin was originally purchased based on fare class. It’s a very customer unfriendly policy and arguably fraudulent. As such, I have decided not to choose RUCs going forward because of the overall hassles involved.

So does this mean we will need to attempt to check in roughly 24 hours in advance, and then call in and ask for them to reissue the ticket? Or is this allegedly supposed to automatically reissue around then (but in practice will not so we’ll need to call in anyway)?

Yes to both. Agents claim it will automatically reissue and not to worry. But I’ve never had it auto reissue and always have an error come checkin time if the RUC was applied via an agent and not reissued. So always good to plan to allow time in your schedule when inside the T-24 window to get this done rather than gambling that an airport agent can assist.

I really wish I had read this sooner...Turns out my waitlist cleared for an upcoming flight and I only found out because I called to apply my RUCs for a different flight!! Even though my reservation still showed my EC seats + the OL waitlist segment alongside it. The agent spent an hour trying to figure this out and my reservation showed my as first class... except there is only 1 seat available for 2 of us... this is incredibly frustrating because just 3 days ago there were at least 5 seats available.

If I hadn't called to request my RUCs be applied somewhere else how else could I have possibly known the RUC cleared if they don't notify us?

edit:
I called back to ask about the seat assignment and the new agent on the phone told me my I shouldn't worry about the seat assignment because my status if shown as "holding confirmed" and the gate agent will figure it out. I explained to her that this makes no sense but she insisted I should not worry because we are confirmed for FC. Is this woman gaslighting me? Should I go back to the 2 remaining EC seats before we lose those and end up in a middle seat on a 6 hr domestic flight??

You should be fine. There is normally one F/J seat held back for any last minute irrops and the like. You will get a "SEAT REQUEST" boarding pass and then at the gate you will be assigned a seat. If worst comes to worst, they may need to downgrade someone who got a free upgrade to give you your confirmed seat, or ask for volunteers to take a later flight to free up aseat for you, if the flight is all full.

And if you are not on tiny single-aisle aircraft but rather a twin-aisle 767, A330 or the like (the only flights where it makes sense to use upgrade certs), there are often 2 seats reserved for pilot rest also. But in case of need, at least one of those can be given away to pax (with pilots' approval, I believe).

Yikes! This is not a situation I want to be in so I asked the supervisor, who told me the RUC upgrade was a glitch and should not have happened, to put me back in EC which she did.

Unfortunately I forgot to ask to have my RUCs applied again, so I called again and now I am being told that my reservation does not match my itinerary so the whole reservation, including the confirmed return RUC portion, will have to be reticketed to their original class...which means I would lose my confirmed RUC portion of the return flight as well since the agent says there is no longer any available RUC space for that flight, and would be waitlisted.

I told the agent i dont want this and she said I run the risk of having issues during check in. Is this correct? Am I going to lose all my RUCs, because of a "glitch" in Deltas system? Any advice greatly appreciated.

This is why RUCs are such a pain and I stopped using them. Every time I’ve used them something along these lines has happened.

But yes, if your reservation does not match your ticket, you will have issues during checkin and receive an error message. This is where an agent sends your ticket to be “reissued” to get everything to match up. They used to be willing to reissue immediately upon an RUC clearing so that in the event of any future changes the confirmed F seat would transfer over to the new flight. But because they have stopped doing this, the system still sees your underlying fare class as something in coach, which is why the agent is saying they would now need to re-clear.

Bottomline is that a knowledgeable, motivated supervisor could fix this by getting global
ticketing support involved. But the catch is being able to get one who is willing. I would call again and hope to get a competent supervisor who can get things straightened out.

I wish I could say all will be ok and not to worry, but this doesn’t bode well. I would certainly not count on any “extra” F seats being held back for oddities such as this. At this point I would keep calling until you get everything straightened out, or at least 2 seats next to each other in your originally purchased cabin. Otherwise you are likely to get displaced and could end up in poor seats in differing parts of the cabin. Don’t leave this to the airport gate agent. Keep calling and escalate, escalate, escalate. Keep us posted!

The key words here are "Global Ticketing Support." Ask the agent to transfer you to Global Ticketing Support. If they do this, your ticket will get fixed, and they might even be able to open up space to honor your upgrade. These agents have the system security/access to move mountains.

Alternately, there are some Minnesota agents who can work miracles. But if you get someone outside of those locations, they will likely be unable to help you. In those cases, be polite (or pretend your connection is cutting out) and HUCA.

I was finally able to get my ticket with RUC applied reissued two days after I applied the RUC. I tried chatting in via iMessage and got a useless agent, but I insisted on being transferred to a supervisor and she connected me to a Customer Experience Supervisor. The supervisor apologized for the previous agent's behavior and immediately reissued the ticket.

Thanks for this - I did call back and found a helpful agent (i think?)

To summarize, I have a roundtrip flight with a companion:
-outbound flight was originally RUC waitlisted, then "cleared" supposedly due to glitch where only 1 FC seat was available, so asked supervisor to go back to EC+, but supervisor forgot to reissie the ticket
-inbound was confirmed RUC at booking

After speaking with many agents I was able to find someone who, after communicating with 3 different people on her end, was able to reissue my ticket with the confirmed RUC outbound.

However, she also told me she was able to reppply the RUC to the outbound flight but I dont see it as such oh my reservation... so now Im worried she was not in fact able to reissue my ticket - how can I confirm this was actually done?

A little confused here, is the RUC applied and cleared on both the outbound and return? Or just one of them? Or just applied but not cleared?

A way to tell if something was reissued properly is to check and see what the fare class is next to a segment on your itinerary and compare it to the receipt.

If it shows First Class (OL) or (OY) on your itinerary, but when you click on your receipt (link at top of page on DL.com) if the receipt shows any other class (like L, U, T, X, V) then that means it has not been reissued properly. Basically, you want both to match.

This is the same flight where there was only “1 seat”?

Last time I had an RUC clear I learned this due to checkin issues. When I got the ticket re-issued and saw my seat assignments, they were seats that previously showed on the seat map as “occupied”, so I’ve wondered if somewhere in the back-end (perhaps related to the “ghost” seatmap when RUCs are applied) that seat had already been assigned?

Just pure speculation as I (as well as 95% of Delta agents) don’t fully understand how these things work.

New hires are quick to claim it's impossible for them to reissue but that's a bunch of baloney. Just called in and (finally!) got an experienced agent that reissued a ticket for me in April using RUC. Suggest calling early morning M-F for highest probability of getting an agent with some actual training.

This has not been my experience. I cancelled a flight with a RUC applied and the agent put in a request to get it reopened. About 72 hours later the RUC was showing available again in my account.

The RUC was originally applied to both legs. Leg 1 was waitlisted. Leg 2 was confirmed. At some point the leg 1 RUC cleared but there must have been some kind of glitch because it was never ticketed (I think?) and by the time it was resolved, there was only 1 seat left. So I spoke to a supervisor and asked them to quickly bring me back to EC+ since there were only 2 seats left (our original 2 seats) because I didn't want to run the risk of being stuck in a middle seat on a 6hr flight. She did this for me BUT apparently did not re-issue the ticket. So when I called back, to see if I could get my original RUC waitlisted again for the 1st leg, a ticketing agent told me the ticket had to be re-issued BUT in order for this to happen, I would have to lose my confirmed RUC upgrade on the 2nd leg and get it re-applied as a waitlist!! After reading the helpful information here I decided to hang up and called back where I found a wonderful agent who re-issued my ticket back to its original condition, i.e. 1st leg in EC+ and 2nd leg with confirmed upgrade as OL.I checked and confirmed the classes (W and OL) match the receipt. Phew!

Now, the very helpful agent had also told me she was able to re-apply the RUCs to the 1st leg as waitlisted. However, I do not see any OL placeholder in my reservation, as I had previously. She did send me an email which showed the 1st leg as two segments: W and O (but not OL), but I don't see this second segment in my reservation. I called back and spoke to two other agents who said the exact same thing, i.e. my 1st leg has had the RUCs applied as a waitlist and I shouldn't worry. So here's my question:
Is it possible the RUCs have actually been reapplied to my 1st leg, even if I dont see any evidence of it on my reservation (neither on the website nor on the app) or should I call global ticketing?

Thanks again to everyone for their help! Here I thought I had the RUCs figured out and almost ended up losing a previously confirmed segment! What a nightmare...