It's worse than that - my wife and I are trying to use our AGR miles to travel SJC->IND via CZ, et al, around Christmas. The official blackout dates for 2009 start on Dec 17, so I figured we'd book the trip to leave on December 16th. The offical AGR legalese says "... travel origination on Redemption awards may not occur on the following dates/times ..." followed by a long list of blackout dates. Emphasis on the word "origination".

I asked the AGR CSR, Mandy, if this was OK and at the time she said sure, no problem. Mandy made the reservation, gave me a confirmation number and my AGR account promptly went down by 30,000 points.

You can guess the next part - a week later, Mandy called back to say that AGR had decided not to issue our tickets because the travel violated the blackout dates. After much back and forth, a week of various phone calls back to AGR Customer Service, AGR Trip Planning (whoever they are!) and various unseen supervisors, AGR finally agreed that "origination" really does mean "the start of the trip" and has promised to send us the tickets for real.

That was two weeks ago and I still haven't actually received the tickets, but I'm hoping they stick to their word.

Bob