I know what you mean, FADelta. We're losing our UA benefits at SkyWest at the end of the month, so I used up a few to send my neighbor and her parents to Florida this past week. The neighbor made both flights as planned, but got the last seats. I ended up using up some buddy passes on US that we also get to prevent them from getting stuck, and even those were a little tight (but at least they made it)

Doesn't help that ORD weather has been horrible the last couple days, which threw a lot of things off, including a TPA-ORD cancellation that filled a lot of seats.