Basic MUA Questions
 

Hello -
Long-time lurker, first time poster. I'm an MP member with about 400K miles but no status since most of my miles are from my Chase card. I use my miles primarily for upgrading on international travel and sometimes (rarely) for domestic award travel.

I know how to search for standard MUAs on United.com and in the past (pre-Covid) some of my upgrades have been available at the time of booking, others have been waitlisted and cleared at some point before boarding (once when I was in line to board - ha). I'm going to South Africa in November this year and have been checking flights for my target dates for a couple months and all of the upgrades have been waitlisted.

My questions for more experienced MP members:

1. Are upgrades less available in general since Covid?
2. Am I better off buying the flight with my waitlisted upgrade now? Or if I buy the flight without an upgrade, does United email members upgrade offers closer to departure (i.e. a lower co-pay or confirmed upgrade)? When traveling internationally I've always requested the upgrade at the time of booking b/c Im paranoid and REALLY want to be in a seat with more room. But I don't know if by doing that I'm missing out on offers for a lower co-pay or something like that?
3. Why are co-pay's so expensive? (yes, I know it's a business and they want their $$$) Pre-Covid they weren't that high, but now it can be almost half the fare price.
4. Do I have a better chance of my upgrade to Business clearing if I buy a Premium Plus fare? Looking at the 2 cabins, the price can be almost the same b/c the Economy fare co-pay is higher.
5. I don't have status so I don't know if it's worth it search in a specific booking class?

TIA for your help.

Yes and No
As a long term trend UA has been releasing less space early and trying to sell premium cabin (or cash upgrades) more aggressively and prices (especially domestic and leisure markets) have dropped encouraging outright purchases
Additionally it has been a battle to match capacity to demand and that has driven upgrades in the shortterm -- sometimes easily, many times hard
But clearing upgrades many months in advance is definitely become harder

UA does not email upgrade offers but they are offered on the website at purchase, at checkin and anytime in between
MUA co-pays have not changed. Perhaps the economy fares have decreased making the copays look high
Yes
Status is an important factor in upgrade clearance but even high elites have trouble finding early upgrade space.

Thank you for the info WineCountryUA.

Well, thank you for that timely bit of information. I just changed a reservation and was contemplating buying first class but then told myself I'll wait for an email. I'll stop waiting.

One serious question concerns upgraded seats. I did pay for extra legroom. Would any offer at the website take that into account? If I purchase an upgrade to first, do I get the seat charge back?

Thank you for being a wealth of information and sharing it.

Is there a list of CRJ550 routes? I tried googling CRJ550 routes flyertalk but came up dry. I also tried searching FR24 for CRJ550's category, no luck.

Not really practical for getting a full list, but as far as public/free services, you can try a handful of routes on ITA matrix with routing code
and extension code
on a particular day to see options.

E.g.,

mind blown. I have moved away from using flight matrix the last couple years since google flights is so easy but this aircraft filter is a game changer.

DCA-EWR

ITA Matrix is a Google product.

A lot more than that. Currently, 550s are flying mostly around NE and midwest.

prepaid baggage and flight change
 

If I voluntarily change my flight and make a new reservation for the same; would my prepaid baggage carry over?

No but it will be refunded -- normally after the schedule departure. You can call and ask for earlier - YMMV.

Thanks for that example. I had no idea.

Is there a way to leave either origin or destination blank? For example, if I want to see every flight either from or to a particular city, or I want to see where a flight arriving in the early morning originated?

Not on ITA.

As answered, not with ITA.

For the former, you can make some informed guesses and put up to six in at a time. You could use google flights map option (https://www.google.com/travel/explore) with non-stop and Star Alliance filters from that particular city, and then cross reference to search ITA, if you are really dedicated.

For the latter, you can look up the tail number of the flight on flightaware to see the recent preceding flights. If you don't know the tail number, you can find it by looking up the flight number on flightstats.

Thanks for that URL; I hadn't seen it before. (I had used Google Flights, but I hadn't looked at the linked pages.)
But if I knew the flight number, I wouldn't need to do anything other than see where the flight originated. If I don't know the flight number, it sounds like I can't look up the tail number (and I certainly don't know it), so I can't see where the flight originated. I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I'm certainly missing something.