While the Continental/United integration process remains a work in progress, one benefit that we saw almost immediately after the merger was reciprocal upgrades on the two carriers. But based on what happened to me today, this technology has not been perfected and it would benefit you to keep a close watch on your itineraries, especially those tickets booked on Continental with flights on United.
My ticket from Frankfurt to Houston via Washington Dulles tonight was issued by Continental but included two UA-operated flights. Theoretically, elite upgrades are assigned automatically based on FFP status and availability in the days leading up to the flight. Today, however, when I checked in for my flight I saw that no upgrade had been requested on my IAD-IAH flight. With a flight time of nearly 3.5 hours and first class now zeroed out, I was not pleased.
I am on the waitlist now and we will see if there are any no-shows (this is a United Express flight operated by a CR7 with six first class seats).
Sadly, I cannot point to an easy fix or way to remedy this problem. Perhaps it was because I was on an international itinerary where the transatlantic flights were not eligible for upgrades. There simply is not a lot of transparency right now in terms of how upgrades are assigned. In any case, my only advice is to monitor NF space and give UA a call if it seems like you should have been upgraded but you have not.
And I missed the upgrade…
For my CO codeshares operated by United, I always confirm the “Upgrade: Pending” appears in the record within the itinerary on the United site. UA agents can still add it in there even if it is a CO flight number, so have had to call a couple of times this year for them to manually insert the upgrade request.
I’ve discussed the problem with a GS agent at Dulles before and apparently there is nothing they can do from their end.
However on flyertalk a workaround was mentioned:
Basically, immediately after you book a UA-operated flight on CO.com, go right to UA.com and use the United record locator to pull up your reservation and immediately assign yourself seats.
If you let CO.com assign seats for you on UA.com then it’s too late and you have to do check-in gate lottery.
There’s usually a window of 5-10 minutes when you can assign your own seats on UA.com. Apparently the issue is if CO assigns your seats it messes with UA’s UDU system.
@Sean: That’s great intel. Thanks.
So if it says “upgrade pending” on ua.com is that enough to be ensured that the upgrade is, indeed, pending?