Originally Posted by
cjgibson
Note: Although this did happen to me once (and Scott and his team handled it very well!), I do believe this is rare. There have been many instances where I've gotten the beep/new boarding pass as I'm boarding, or I get called to the front of the plane just prior to pushback. The vast majority of GAs do their job well; GAs like this one, of course, need some "teachable moments".
I'm not sure what the definition of rare is, but the fact that we're able to catch it, and catch it repeatedly, for several years, I'd say it's way too frequent.
If just one agent works say 5 flights in a shift, five days a week, and mishandles an average of one upgrade per flight, that's well over 1,000 upgrades a year that are mishandled. Now say 50 of CO's "most professional men and women in the industry" are doing this, and that's 50,000 upgrades a year that are mishandled.
I've been the victim of it at least twice, and witnessed it happen a handful more times, and there are countless other stories (though this is one of the better ones where they were caught, confronted, and forced to explain after the fact).