Thanks for the advice-I will certainly call beforehand to verify. However, it's strange that, when the EWR staff in the past fixed whatever was wrong, it did correct for the return. We're talking very simple roundtrips, not multi-legs. But yes, thanks, I will definitely do that in the future.

In the interest of not making my initial post any longer than it already was, I didn't post our entire back and forth. I did, however, immediately ask him to contact CO reservations. He told me he couldn't?? He handed me his phone at one point to talk to a CO ticket office in Beijing. They also said they couldn't help me...I needed to talk to NW. Again-I was left wondering why I was being forced to rectify this problem on my own. When he told me to call NW, I asked to use his phone to call a local number (40084008 or something like that), as I didn't have the correct country and city codes handy and he actually looked angry with me.

It's not worth actually getting into the whole back and forth. My main point is not to get someone in trouble or to demand any compensation or anything like that. I just need to make CO aware of this problem so that it doesn't happen to others (whether it be with NW upgrades now-as has happened to me almost every time I've used them, or with *alliance ones in the future) and to hopefully just let them know what is proper treatment of customers and what is not. I'm a regular traveler who was dumb enough not to have a CO or NW non 800 number available to call. I just happened to be lucky enough to have a credit card that transferred me through to someone who could actually help. I was frantically searching my blackberry for phone numbers, but you all know how slow that process is and ultimately you end up with 800 numbers. In the end, I solved my own problem. But I was lucky. The agents did NOTHING to help. Another 2 minutes and without that credit card collect number to put me through to someone to fix an apparently simple problem, I'd be sending this message from Beijing (spending my money on hotels and new airline tickets). Just really disappointing service for me.

I have learned so much from you folks here and I'm certainly not a big-league traveler like many of you. I'm probably very insignificant to CO as a whole. I just scrape by as a Plat every year and though I almost always fly Business, it's all due to free or mileage upgrades. I work for a non-profit (gasp) and truly am thankful for the opportunities of upgrade afforded to me and certainly would not ever have any unrealistic expectations of over-the-top service owed to me. However, I was honestly pretty humiliated by this whole thing. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but I admit to tearing up at one point. I do truly like CO, but was, and continue to be, disheartened by this experience. Since it wasn't the first time it happened to me, I imagine that it's happened to others as well. I'd just like to make sure that someone is aware so that, in the future, it doesn't and that people who use a good percentage of their yearly points to upgrade and to "enjoy the experience" aren't forced to tears, running for their gate.