I don't know if I should laugh or cry after my first encounter with the new same day stand by rule this morning.

After trying to get home from CLE to ORD last night on the 8:40PM flight calling 4 different times, I gave up. All agents told me my booking class was not available and I could not stand by... No dice on the OLCI either. (was booked on the 8:30AM flight this morning). So I show up and got in pretty early so I decided to check out the brand new same day stand by first hand and get on the 7:35AM flight .

I could do it at the gate, the GA wanted 50 dollars. I reminded him to look at my BP where it says Platinum. He said it was the same price for everyone, I kindly replied that elite pay USD25. A lady in a red jacket came over and said "let's look up the rules on this new head ache Houston has blessed us with".

So out came a few print outs and another contender to the mornings nickel and dime tollbooth walked up. He was gold and wanted to stand by aswell. So after a few minutes the friendly red jacket lady said. Thank you for setting us straight, Elites of course only pay USD 25... The gold guy said "what?? I have paid 50 dollars two times earlier"

The friendly CO lady just shook her head and asked the Gentleman to please call CO about this.

So after about 15 minutes, 25 dollars was collected from the both of us and we had a shiny, new BP in our hands.

Two minutes later the other GA announced a 15 minute delay because the Captain who was commuting to work was arriving from Rochester late. I looked at the screens, the Rochester flight was landing early, so delay was not the factor. It was landing at 0752, the GA said it was landing at 0742 and expected the flight to leave at 0750, 15 minutes late.
The Captain was the issue here. He didn't plan his work day and was the sole reason for the delay. My new Gold friend and I both agreed that we trusted the screens more than the GA and that it would take waaaay more time than the GA said. We walked back to the gate and said we wanted a refund and to get on our original flight as well.

The answer? Forget it, the fee is non refundable. The nice lady whispered that maybe it was a good idea to give a refund because of the situation. Phones were in action, but rejected.

So we both tried at the President's Club where we almost got it sorted out, but just almost. We ran out of time and got on the flight and at 8:05 the Captain entered (as we predicted) with the morning face of the century. They of course pulled the jet bridge quicly but the Captain needs to go through the check list so we left the gate at 8:25, in the air 8:35 and landed 4 minutes before our original flight at ORD.

I don't know about the gold friend, but I called We Care and the agent there said that Plats were exempt from the change fee

I told her that every time I interacted with CO personnel, I get different answer and that she was wrong according to the website. As for the booking class issue, she didn't have an answer and was obviously embarrassed about how poorly this ridiculous policy has been implemented by CO.

I thought CO was a better airline, and as a fresh Platinum, in most cases they are.

But in this case they are coming across as much worse than United.

I hope you are reading this, Scott. This is hurting your business and it's amateur hour to say the least when your employees have no clue what the rules are and you website is NOT telling the truth..

End of the story was that I got my 25 bucks back (in 15-20 business days she said). But this headache is not something I want to deal with when traveling on business every week. Not to mention the GAs who have to deal with situations like the one I was in today.

This fee needs to go..