Flew phx-iah-ord this week and upgraded as a lowly plat. Go figure and was happily amazed. Like a poster said upthread a few posts UA isn't the airline it used to be. It's all about FCM and unfortunately kettles are given the option of buying up to F as a TOD at a lower price than us "overentitled elites".

Like I said before in another thread, I'll be 1K by the fall, but will plan on doing an AA match. EXP's there sit up front every time.

I seem to be doing better than many golds....
 

.....I'm just over 50% at 7 out of 12 so far this year. I fly to some leisure markets (FLL & MCO) and often fly weekends. I'll be cutting back on UA once I reach Million Mile in 12,000 miles.

In the interests of full disclosure, it is more like 80-90% on AA as an ExPlat. It is most certainly not 100%.

I've been upgraded as silver a few times already this year. After next trip I'll be gold.

If you are flying hub-to-hub and/or during peak business times upgrades are hard, even for 1Ks. I just booked a four segment trip in "M" and only one of my four segments had PN and two of my four segments are already booked full in C. And the flights don't leave until the end of July!

If you travel at off times, leisure destinations (except Carib and SJD) or to Latin America, even Silvers stand a good chance of upgrades. My last flight to Orlando went out 1/2 empty in F. Last night's EWR-CLE A320 went out with an empty F seat. Virtually every Mexico/CentAm-Houston flight I take is filled with non-revs, if they are filled in F at all.

Received upgrade notification via email re tomorrow's PHX-IAH flight at T-47:45. If this upgrade holds, my "Gold" upgrade rate on CPU-able flights since January 1 will rise from 40 to 44%.

Double Upgrade as Gold
 

Flew MCO to IAH, and IAH to YYC on June13. Wife and I (both Gold) upgraded both legs. First UA flights this year.

Hard to miss YYC :D

Still close to 0% upgrades on EWR-IAH-EWR. Even on odd travel days (Monday night, Wednesday Morning) and using RPU/GPUs. Heck even on an M fare class! 1K.....

Upgraded as a silver yesterday Den to Abq.

I nearly always get EC+ at checkin.

My wife is silver. The only reason she is is that she had to make an emergency trip to Rio last year when her sister had surgery. I have no status(thank god my frequent business travel days are over with). We got upgraded both ways IAH-CUN last week. Like I told her look at the people getting on the plane. They are families/vacationers. Not frequent travelers. Easy to score upgrades on flights to there and CZM.

50% upgrade success rate as a gold (on AA)
0% upgrade success rate as a gold on UA

EWR & LGA - IAH has been impossible for me all these years. Even the earliest/latest flights.

If you had been on my MUC-IAD flight from a few weeks ago (on Tuesday), you could've upgraded as a Silver. Many C seats went empty.

As a MM Gold, last week was the first time I've had an upgrade clear in 2015 (and on the return I had a gate agent come on the plane to upgrade me) but I got hosed on both.

My outbound from JAX-ORD was delayed by over 6 hours and I was rerouted on lovely ExpressJet 145s through EWR so no chance there.

On the return (ORD-JAX) where the agent came onboard, I moved up to 1C and a minute later she returned to send me back to coach (another FC passenger was sitting in a seat with yellow tape across it saying it was broken).

Not a real good record for 2015..