One thing to drusba's excellent post (and thanks again for all the tracking). The system seems to release cancellations straight into the pool without checking against the waitlist - so by checking in on the website or calling people can "luck into" the unlikeliest things.
That no longer appears to be true.Is this still the case? Others have mentioned that after cancelling a reservation, they would immediately check to see if the freed rooms/dates were available in the pool and could not find them.
So that means the system will automatically check for a match against the wait list? I had heard it used to be batches that were run several times a day which would allow people to luck into a reservation.