United's View Waitlist Beta

Tim is flying back to Sydney next week and has a PlusPoints upgrade to Polaris pending. He's United Gold and flying in Premium Economy, so his chances are as good as we can make them. Normally the upgrade list doesn't become visible until ≈72 hours before your flight. In years past, I've occasionally called in a favor from a friend at United to get a peek at this list early so we could make some alternate arrangements if our chances were looking grim. 

I'd heard United was going to roll out a new Beta feature to allow early viewing of the upgrade list and sure enough, Tim was selected for inclusion in the Beta. Last week he was looking at his flight in the United app on his phones and saw this:

He's flying out in 8 days and there are 7 seats left. He's 4th in line for those 7 seats. Last week he was 4th in line for 9 seats. Keeping in mind that all airlines these days will do anything to earn incremental revenue, everyone in the back of the plane will get some kind of cash upgrade offer when viewing their reservation or checking in for their flight. In other words, those 7 seats will definitely become 6… or 5… (or fewer) before he departs. 

The worst part for us is that once you've applied your PlusPoints to request an upgrade, you're not given a cash offer. You quite literally have to remove the upgrade request and then go back in to your booking and see what your offer looks like. I'm not super up to speed on the finer points of how this list works, but I do know that in the event of a PlusPoints upgrade tie (eg, two Golds both vying for the same seat), the age of the reservation (and maybe the upgrade request?) comes into play. I'd really prefer not to muck with that until I'm certain it wouldn't somehow reset his reservation date for these tiebreaker scenarios. 

I've said it before but I'll say it again: the upgrade waiting game is stressful and generally antithetical to having a calm, relaxing trip. Given how few confirmable upgrade seats there are these days, this is the only option we have left other than paying $10,000 for a one way flight from North America to Sydney.