I had a very difficult seat to ticket. My mother has to be in Sapporo on 3 May and instead of following my brother's family up via NGO on 2 May, insisted on flying direct on 1 May.

Furthermore for a <5 hour flight she insisted on flying "better than economy". The 74K that normally serves the route has been swapped out for a 77Z that day so it's business or nothing.

The fare our TA came up with was full J with $29K R/T, with a $5K reduction for ticketing the NGO-HKG in W and upgrading it to U with 10K AM.

This was months ago. The ticketing deadline was Thu 24 Apr. I newly acquired KVS and saw availability go less and less (something like J2 Y0). To issue the return itinerary cost $32K at CX.com.

TA told me she saw upgrade availability but cannot take advantage of it at Y0. I told TA to go ticket the J.

I think I looked again on Sat 26 Apr. The availability was J0 Y0 so I thought the flight was jam packed. There were three empty business seats in seat map but I didn't thought much of it.

So you can understand my fury when this morning's KVS availability looked like this:

J7 C7 D6 I6 Y9 B9 H9 K9 M9 L9 V9 G9 S9 N9 Q9 O9

And 4 U seats became available.

I can't accuse CX of doing something illegal (I don't think even the new competition ordinance catches CX out on this one). But I really wish there's more competition to keep CX honest and stop it from sculping customers like this.