Redeemed J-F upgrade from my ICN-HKG flight this November and was just told that due to operational reasons there has been an aircraft switch and as such I need to be downgraded to J. I sent in a complaint via the online form and recently got this reply from CRD...
Thank you for your latest email and bringing your concerns to our attention.
I can completely understand why you are disappointed and hope you will accept my sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused.
As you are aware, we are unable to guarantee that there would not be any aircraft equipment change for our flights. However, when we do have such changes, we will inform our passenger and offer alternative flights or offer the fare or miles difference to customer. For your flight in November, there are unfortunately no flights with first class services till the end of November. Therefore, we could only refund the Upgrade redemption without any service fees. I appreciate your kind understanding of this incident and am sorry for the disappointment this must have caused you. I assure you that if there were alternative options available, our Marco Polo club staff would have proactively offered you.
Thank you once again for bringing your concerns to our attention. I very much hope your next experience with us will be more enjoyable.
Seems like the only compensation for the involuntary downgrade is the refund of miles
without any service fees...well DUH!?!? Why would they charge me for service fees if this clusterf*ck was their fault in the first place.