Given the 'policy' -- it appears that the agents were initially trying to give him a 'break' on the extra fee. Of course, the pax clearly was not aware of the existing policy, & was relying on his previous experience on CO for an 'exception'.

Hopefully the pax chose to relay his unpleasant customer service experience directly to CO. It's clearly not up to CO Insider to read an outside account posted by an FTer and respond to it, -- as opposed to the actual pax posting a thread here, directly.