There are a lot of misconceptions about upgrades. People talk about dressing up, hoping to get bumped up. Or telling the gate agent that it’s your honeymoon. Sometimes they claim there’s even a secret passphrase.

For the most part, though, upgrades are based on a formula and handled by computer. American Airlines even automates much of their upgrade processing at the gate to a computer program called ‘AgentAssist.’ By reducing the amount of work the gate agent does, they’re able to staff gates with fewer agents and save money.

When computers handle the upgrades, there’s less opportunity for discretion, and as long as everyone is classified correctly on the list. But there are still plenty of cases where gate agents don’t follow the upgrade list.

For instance, frequently gate agents won’t bother to do upgrades at the very last minute at all. If a first class passenger doesn’t show up for the flight (maybe they are connecting, and their inbound aircraft is late or they get waylaid in the bathroom in the terminal) they would be doing the work to print a new boarding pass and come on board the aircraft to move up a coach passenger – right before they’re supposed to be closing the doors. And this extra work could wind up delaying the flight a minute or two, which would get them yelled at by a manager.

One Delta Air Lines gate agent actually admits to not following procedure with upgrades whenever two different situations come up.

• They won’t bother to check if passengers traveling together want to be split up. The agent says that when there’s one upgrade seat together, and two people on the reservation, they’ll just get skipped.

  [S]ometimes if there’s one fc seat available and a party of two together both 1 and 2 on the upgrade list it can be annoying, especially if it’s several parties of two… rather than calling them up and seeing if they wanna split and have one take the seat and maybe they aren’t in the gate area… blahh.. i’ll move on to the next solo in line.

  [R]ather than clearing them off the upgrade list i’ll change their seat assignment manually to the fc seat then delete them from the fc standby list so it won’t show on the app or monitors that they cleared the upgrade ahead of the groups. their boarding zone oddly doesn’t change when i do this

• They won’t ask if a customer wants to be moved from regular coach to extra legroom middle seats, giving those ‘Comfort+’ seats to employees instead.

  i do not place mc passengers in middle seats in comf+ even if they are on the upgrade list, if they are in a window or isle seat in mc. those middle seats sometimes go to nonrev standbys on completely full flights

I’ve noticed that Delta is most likely to skip processing upgrade lists at the gate of the major airlines, and this agent with the airline admits to deviating from procedure, while protecting their anonymity. It’s a window that would be helpful to Delta in ensuring consistency, but I’ve flagged these issues for some time and it doesn’t seem to get fixed.

When US Airways took over American Airlines, legacy US Airways agents used to skip over passengers waiting for upgrades if they weren’t at the gate when upgrades were being done, which was strange because customers frequently didn’t even need new boarding passes handed out – their boarding passes would update automatically in the airline’s app. Eventually American fixed that training issue, and of course now much of the upgrade processing has been taken away from the agents themselves anyway. So there’s hope these things can be fixed.