Got SMS notification that my E-Upgrade cleared
 

I don't remember this happening before, but today I got an SMS alert when my E-Upgrade cleared for my ORD-SAT flight. It was in the United EasyUpdate format that alerts me to departure/arrival times. Is this new? I thought it was a nice touch.

Just imagine how it would have been 15 years ago
 

Just imagine how life would be 15 years ago without SMS/Text messaging. We wouldn't know when our upg rades cleared let alone if the flight was on time.

Thanks to the inventor of SMS Text Messaging.

I've probably gotten 25 of them in the last year. System has worked for quite a while.

Same here! I love that option with UA.com I can now call UA as soon as I receive the SMS upgrade cleared message to secure my favorite seat! :D

Although I frequently don't get the SMS messages for anything but "Flight xxxx leaves on time from gate xx," they do seem to occasionally trickle in for cancellations, upgrades, etc. Usually, I find a call to HAL discovers whether the u/g has cleared or not much more reliably than EasyUpdate :rolleyes:

No, it's not new. Unless, of course, you only recently updated your profile to enable SMS messaging for EasyUpdate. ;)

One thing about EasyUpdate is that it's somewhat spotty in reliability. I recently went through 2-hour flight delays ORF-IAD and IAD-SFO, as a result of severe storms at IAD. EasyUpdate told me about a half-hour delay on the ORF-IAD flight, and informed me that the IAD-SFO flight would be departing on time. It stopped sending me any further messages about either flight, even though there were major departure delays on both. Seems like the system failed just when I needed it most! :( (To be fair, though, this is a characteristic of a lot of systems....)

I love it. It's even txt'ed me when my flight has been rebooked for me.

About 2 years ago, the system reported maybe 50% of my upgrades. Now, or at least over the past year, it's 100%. Woo hoo UA!! :)

I have noticed that if you're waitlisted for an upgrade that doesn't involve 500 milers and the 100, 72, 48 hour windows (i.e. WL on an int'l flight using a SWU)...you won't get a SMS. For that, you need to check My Itineraries everyday.

I had about 7-8 upgrades waitlisted and then cleared this year and have never received SMS notifications for any of them. :td:

Meanwhile, the system never failed to reaffirm me that the flights arrived on schedule everytime when I turned on the cell phone after touching down . :)

Not so. I get EasyUpdate messages about upgrades requested using CR1s (and I believe SWUs as well).

But the system is spotty, as I said. You don't always get messages that you should.

I've been receiving messages about upgrade clearances for a while now, usually around 2am for a 9am international flight, or 11pm for a 10am transcon. To be fair, a few did come in a few days before departure too.

The I-Wish-You-Would-Have-Paged-Me-Earlier messages usually arrive just after I finish booking a standby connection on a late arrival. But those have not been as good as what I book, as in a next morning flight instead of the last flight of the evening.

I've been getting them for I think over 2 years now.

Hear hear.

I don't use SMS, but I agree that EasyUpdate sucks. I usually get notified of ANY change about 33% of the time, if I'm lucky. Sometimes I get an email, sometimes a voicemail, sometimes both. Most of the time, I find out upgrades and itinerary changes when I login to My Itineraries without EasyUpdate ever calling.

I originally registered last fall for EasyUpdate. Always received the SMS notifications for flight times. This was definetly the first time I received an upgrade notification though, which is what threw me off. I don't believe I've altered my EasyUpdate profile at all in the last six months. Weird.

I get notified about 75 % of the time using Easyupdate by phone..