My first offical post on FT
I'm going BOS-VIE for business in April and decided to have a fun trip around the world by going from VIE to my hometown CTU (Chengdu, China) then direct flight to SFO and back to BOS.
Company will pay for BOS-VIE and CTU-BOS, which is cheaper than B-V roundtrip. I'll take care VIE-CTU on my own since it's personal. A one way VIE-CTU economy ticket is $3~4000 OMG! So I booked a reward trip for 75K + $97 VIT-FRA-SHE-CTU. First two legs are business class on Lufthansa which covers almost 12 hours. But the last leg on Air China was only economy at booking back in February.
I looked on CA website and the discount F ticket for the 4 hours flight is around 2750Yuan ~$430.
Then last Sat. I decided to check the same trip again as booking new, and saw it has the 3rd leg as F now, same 75K, but $150 ($100 pay + $50 close in fee). I wanted to change my reservation, but change doesn't give me that option. So I made a stupid decision to cancel and try to rebook. The cancel request was sent but it's not been processed right away which I don't have another 75K to rebook.
So I called MP number. They were busy on Sat. But after 15 min wait I got connected to explain what I did. The agent didn't ask much and started to help me change my reservation. Since the cancel request hasn't been processed, he was able to remove the request flag. Then I only need to pay the price difference of $3 and no close in fee to get the 3rd leg bumped into F class. Woohoo, that's way better than $430 extra if I have to pay myself. Thanks MP agent.