Hoping for a first-class upgrade? Being tall and well-dressed helps

QUESTION: A month ago I was bumped up from economy to business class on a Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Frankfurt. Just curious, what criteria do they use to select who gets upgraded?

ANSWER: It just so happens that a friend of a friend of mine works as a check-in agent for Lufthansa, so I asked her (totally off the record, of course). "We do sometimes have discretionary upgrades, and I choose people who are very tall, well dressed, or just someone who seems interesting. One passenger I upgraded was an opera star, and since I love opera, I moved him up. We also do operational upgrades when economy is sold out, but then we choose people who have paid full fare and who are very frequent fliers with us."
And anecdotally, a friend of mine was flying from San Francisco to Vancouver not long ago, and as he was about to board, the gate agent upgraded him to first class. “Why me?” he asked. “The station manager saw you and noticed that you were very well dressed and told me to upgrade you,” he was told. My friend, by the way, happens to be tall and good-looking, so that probably helped, too!