weero

This ads more conflict than it resolves as we know that the PA WL is not driven by status of the pax traveling. Access to the PA is granted by the status of the sponsor of the instruments, i.e. miles or SWUs from 1Ks/GS bring you into the PA rather than the PB. But within the PA the processing is FIFO.

Also an upgrade doesn't just 'become available'. NC space is allocated by IM which always require operator intervention. And I believe this is where the conflicting experiences come from: IM can choose what to grant and what not.

I believe however that what the reservations manager wrote is what should hold on the day of departure. Should ... as it is often handled very differently.

fadeforward

Got it. If your IM experience is generalizable, and it's FIFO regardless of the number in your party, then I agree that there is no reason to split. If not, it becomes a gamble to clear on IM (split) or DM (don't split). This is why this is such an important issue.

Cross-referencing itins does not do as well at achieving what you mention here, assuredly.

It's hard to read into that quotation, but I don't see it as adding that much conflict. The manager isn't speaking as precisely as she or he could be. It shouldn't be "due to your 1K level" but "due to the 1K instruments they are using" and the passive voice "upgrade seat becomes available" seems like perfectly reasonable language.

Back to your experiences, weero, is it possible that your agent saw 8 people on the PB list who were being blocked? It seems reasonable to me that there is a decision rule that says, as long as people are on PA, hold all people in PB. This would make both your experience and FT conventional wisdom consistent.

l etoile

Keep in mind that he was writing to a passenger in general terms. I think you might be dissecting the words a little more than they were intended to be. I think the general point of whether or not you get passed or not is all that's really being addressed in this response ...not what gets one on the PA list or how IM works.

weero

Agreed - that was by no means a critique of your account - please accept my apologies! I got a very similar email from a UA agent in SYD on this matter.

What I do believe however that during their work as res agents for UA, these people do not have access to the code that drives the PA. They use the system but they have no access or insight into the gearing of the PA.

I did not dig into that to be honest - naively assuming that 8 pax on the WL means 8 pax on PA+PB.

But your original counter-argument to my experience is the strongest one I heard so far: if NC is 1 and I feed a 2 pax request, this request cannot be confirmed right away. If then NC does not decrease to 0, ANYONE - independent of WL priority or status - can grab that seat with a confirmed instrument.

In my cases, NC stayed 1 for several more hours but was zero on all segments the day after. The flights in at least two cases were in the very far future (9+ months ahead). so that I think theses were not ug requests granted to other pax .. but of course I cannot be sure.

Also - why was the decrease in NC not immediate? Maybe it requires a sweep or even human interaction. But in none of these case the ug was granted within the first few days.

Now DUG's case is even more mysterious as her NC stays at 1 and hence should be up for grabs ... but it isn't .

fadeforward

Haha, but here we get our conclusions confounded by .bomb deficiencies, which are even trickier to anticipate! Many in other threads have reported NC1 with no availability when calling, or NC0 and their upgrade clears immediately. This happened to me, incidentally, both ways in one ticketing. .bomb showed NC1/NC0 on outbound/return and I was waitlisted on the outbound and cleared on the return. What a mess!

Someone with a spare SWU can do a booking, upgrade, and a 24-hour refare on that flight and find out whether it really is up for grabs!

weero

But that does make a lot of sense in the bigger picture - this would explain why NC stayed for a while ... could hence be a mere interface error.

I never had that situation myself (NC1 and not being able to confirm) except once for a domestic hop. I attributed it to the incompetence of the agent in the Warsaw call centre ... but looking at your experience that might have been uncalled for .
A CR1 or miles will do I guess - risking the life of those precious SWUs .. cannot stand the thought.

lfs2shrt

Wait until you clear your UPG then ask someone over phone to split your PNR if UA still don't want to do it. Do it at the gate. It is kind of problematic for some agents to divide a PNR because the different steps they have to do but they can call to the Help desk. It is a department which assist customer service agents with any problem ticket, fare rules, pnr's ect. There are some few agents who are very fast dividing PNR's...

Downunder girl

Well this is a really interesting discussion! But I am still no clearer in how I should proceed.

If someone wants to do the above experiment, let me know and I will provide my flight number and date .

I have also called in the past when there was NC=1 showing, and been told that I couldnt upgrade, so this scenario of bomb showing inventory but it not actually being available, does occur. Ok yes, it was the MCC .

With my current res, I called the MCC and queried the NC=1 and why cant they at least confirm one of us if we are first on the list etc etc. I was told they cant do that without splitting the pnr (fair enough, I knew it was impossible, but wanted to ask anyway ). They said that 2 seats need to be avail for us to clear. So then I asked what happens if someone else comes on the list and wants that seat, do they get it? Answer was a tentative NO, not unless its at DM or we have cleared first. Again - reminder this was the MCC not USA Call centre so that is certainly not a confidence instilling answer .

I must admit that it is torturous seeing the NC=1 still sitting there while we wait it out - over 2 months now. I would love to grab it . This is on the very hard to clear route of SFO-JFK return, where at best you only see NC=1 or NC=0 on most flights.

I have a feeling (could be wrong) that if we did split pnrs and worse case, only 1 gets uged and 1 has to stay in E+, that I could possibly persuade gate agent to at least get me back into E+ because I am travelling with a child . IMHO I am sure they can find someone else to give the nice C upgrade to . I guess it would mean we are sitting all over the cabin though if that scenario occurs, as the seat assignments would be a dog's breakfast at DM.

Maybe we should do a poll on FT....split or stay together ???

fadeforward

This is a tough experiment... if the NC1 cleared, it's not entirely clear the NC1 would be reinstated upon cancellation. So many mysteries to the IM! Still, if someone has a spare CR1...!

This is a tough one because you have to balance the risk of being split from your child with the risk of losing the upgrade. I can only speak for myself trying to imagine myself in your situation. I'd call again to try to get a sense of the percentage of seats spoken for in C. If it were less than 1/4, I would be confident of clearing on the IM. My vote would be to split. Good luck, DG!

weero

While this seems to corroborate my account - it was a reservation agent. Possibly a good one as they do exist in the MCC but not an IT insider .. short, it means nothing.
Well you can always trade with the neighbor of mini-DUG .

If the story was about that one leg, I'd split in a heartbeat DUG and value fadeforward's advice - but let's be rational, it's a ridiculous domestic hop the return of which you already mastered. A tiny, tiny transcon and you are two folks and mini-DUG doesn't even drink booze. What's the difference to domestic F anyway???

Now face the inverse scenarios: your seats get moved by one of these countless .bomb seizures: you will not even sit next to miniDUG when you are not on the same PNR.
Or the 744 on the way home to SYD fails once more and you get rebooked. It is not that unlikely that you will not end up together, that only one will get the premium seat etc etc.

I would NEVER even contemplate running that risk in favour a bloody little domestic hop. That F doesn't even give you lounge access, so why struggle for it?

l etoile

It looks like she booked a PS flight. That's one domestic flight that's still worth upgrading.

(And no need for the apology ...I was taking what you said to be a critique of what the manager wrote ...so no worries. )

weero

Oh definitely.

But DUG and miniDUG are hopping SYD-US-US and you know how prone the SYD-SFO/LAX routes are to failures! Even the prospect of flying in middle of a PS bird seems like a high price for that risk.
Thanks - it was a critique of the complexity UA has created in there as not even their front line employees have or can have a reasonable insight into the system.

On LH e.g. I never got a wrong information regarding the ug status or procedure. But it also is about 10000 times simpler than what UA instated.

Downunder girl

Thanks to Fadeforward and Weero for your input ^.

I can only dream of F class! I am trying to ug into C class on the p.s flights.

Yes, point taken re the erratic nature of the SFO-SYD hop, however we did split pnrs last time and took that route and survived (and got uged on both flights ex JFK), so I guess I wasnt really looking at that worse case scenario with split pnrs of being rebooked in the event of irrops etc . I have enough nightmares as it is .

The p.s flt with NC=1 is the flight ex SFO-JFK on a different day to our ex SYD departure day, so less risk there. Our return flight is the one that covers JFK-SFO-SYD in one day - ouch that is 24 hrs flying, so while we do have the VIP transpac leg in C, its still a very long day and would be nice to enjoy C on the shorter p.s leg also . After all once you get a taste for it, its hard to go back .

Still undecided and doing nothing at this stage .

boeingair

--Bump--

Waitlisted for LAX-BOS and return on a 2 person PNR for this coming week using miles (so PB waitlist I imagine). Trying to decide whether to split the PNR. Anyone had any more experience with not splitting and being passed over?

My worry is that if we split we would both clear but maybe at different times, where if we didn't split, two other one-person PNRs would be cleared instead of us.

fadeforward

I'm confused and have a number of questions. 1) Did you really burn 15K miles each for a 1-hour flight? 2) Did you check the availability to see if you would confirm immediately? 3) If the F availability is low and you're a 2P, you probably won't clear until the gate anyways, so you might as well keep the PNR together, no? 4) You can always call and ask how many are on the waitlist, PA or otherwise, but I'd presume that you won't clear until the gate, if at all, so again, you might as well keep things together, and 5) Is it really worth your time to split for the miniscule upgrade in probability that you'd spend a 1-hour flight in F?