I agree. This is good for 1K and GS. If I still flew that much, I’d be very happy right now. OTOH, I am very glad my days of flying more than 100,000 miles a year are over. :D

So the number of PlusPoints required is equal to the highest upgrade in the request. If you request an EWR-SFO-Asia request and the highest PlusPoint price upgrade in your request is Premium Plus, the entire request costs 20 PlusPoints.

GS economy award upgrade to polaris is still treated as regular economy to business (eg 40 points for longhaul), right?

SkipWait has to be 120 or 160 PlusPoints... pretty clever of United to give people an option to blow through their PP's.

well, isn't a common gripe that GPUs rarely clear and thus aren't all that valuable? so instead of being able to request 8 upgrades that may not clear, at least you'll have 2-3 Skip Waits guaranteed, for example?

eh, we'll see how good/bad it is once it goes live...

Oh, I'm with you - a certain % of folks (including those leaving 1K / UA) will be tempted to just confirm it and reduce their PlusPoints to 0, reducing the upgrade liabilities on UA's books. Win-Win (for some).

I added a quick summary and most of the UA Insider questions to the Wiki -- hopefully a quicker read for people with questions.

Did I understand this correctly...."Skipwait points will not be refunded if the flight is voluntarily changed?"

That is crap if the whole point of this anytime upgrade is extra points. There will be plenty of pissed off folks if their travel plans change.

Thanks for the quick update!
Another question is is G/K/L/T/S eligible to upgrade to Premium Plus with 20 PlusPoints?

This change is potentially an enhancement for Platinum as previously they only got RPUs. As someone that decided to really stretch to make 1K this year and it really is about the GPUs for me, I think this will make landing at Platinum in 2021 a little more palatable. (This change should be added to the thread of whether it is better to stretch to 1K vs Platinum).

The key difference for me will be wanting Polaris when there is no PP and as a Platinum this will be achievable. I am in the camp of folks who like PP. Currently R fares are very reasonable in price and hope this holds.

Respectfully disagree. Skipwait is a feature you didn't have yesterday. No one is forcing you to use it if you don't like the conditions.

I actually understand UA's logic -- if you tie up J inventory for (potentially) several months, you shouldn't be able to free up the J space 2 hours prior to flight time by paying a $300 change fee.

This is interesting. If you can search for "skip waitlist" it would seem that it will be a specific fare bucket that has availability.

It would seem that this would only show up once at least one person has waitlisted for an UG prior to the 30 day mark. Of course, this could mean the end of releasing UG inventory prior to the 30 day mark. Basically put everyone on waitlist and open up Skip Waitlist inventory for anyone willing to blow the extra points. I'm not sure how this dovetails with mileage upgrades. Maybe those will be considered waitlist upgrades and would trigger the opening of "Skip Waitlist" inventory.

That policy is inline with not just skipwait points. For any upgrade after it's been confirmed, you now cannot make a change without forfeiting the points. It's probably the biggest devaluation here although it's rarer for me to change a flight after getting an upgrade unless it's a CPU. If your plans are uncertain, just don't waitlist until hours before departure and you're sure of your plans. Getting rid of the 24 hour before departure rule is a huge improvement which half offsets the point forfeiting. Also scheduled changes/IRROPS do allow a refund of the pluspoints although it's probably a manual process that you have to keep an eye on.

Another change I don't see mentioned yet is that GUM-HNL is now the equivalent of RPU-eligible, so you could theoretically upgrade EWR-HNL-GUM-NRT for the cost of a single RPU (20 PlusPoints)

Not bad. For PP, nice I suppose to use two RPUs for an international flight. Will I still look out for PZ space for a PlusPoints upgrade on an international flight?