Originally Posted by ijgordon

To be fair, it was never a problem historically getting onto the Upgrade Standby List at the airport. It was almost always automatic, as were refunds of co-pay/miles if the upgrade didn't clear.

I have no idea what's going on now, but clearly there have been a lot of reports of people having massive problems getting on the list now. However, it's not entirely clear that these people didn't actually get on the list (they may have just been too low of a priority). As DLPhoenix posted, s/he didn't think s/he was on the list, but the upgrade did clear automatically. It might be a case of pre-merger UA agents not being able to see the list properly and the online list not reflecting the true list.

Regardless, I would definitely send PMs to UA Insider, I don't know if this has been brought up in the system integration issues thread.

FWIW, a number of years ago (4-5?) if your upgrade didn't clear at T-24h you were completely out of luck. And actually it was T-72hrs for many years even further back. But there was enough screaming from Platinum elites whose upgrades didn't clear walking past empty BF seats (that were subsequently filled by nonrevs) that they eventually modified the policy to allow standby. I'll add that even when it was a drop-dead cutoff of 24 hours they did a pretty good job of releasing most if not all remaining seats prior to the waitlist expiration. My parents got 2 of the last 3 seats exactly at T-24 on a flight to Europe, and my partner and I got 2 of the last seats (on a waitlisted award ticket) on EWR-ATH right at T-24.