Originally Posted by maxvor

Just to report back: my upcoming flights were cancelled, and just a refund was not the option I would be happy with. Equipped with knowledge of allowed alternatives I was ready to fight with LX and my OTA to move the flight to 2021. The fight came, but not exactly where I was expecting it. Upon first call with OTA they suggested refund or reprice if moved forward. When I've pointed out about alternative 3 in agent manual, an agent said that they had particular instructions from Swiss on how to handle it. Fine, I gave the call to Swiss directly to check what the options were, given their web-site still states the following:

I didn't expect any reprice given I didn't want to change destination or bump to higher cabin. Similar sounded a bit ambiguous. The reply I was given: no reprice in case the same RBD is available at later date, only tax difference if any might need to be charged extra. Ok, cool I thought, but now how to prove it to OTA. They wouldn't accept my word for that, Swiss of course wouldn't give any waiver code because they are not waiving upcharge just for any reason, only if same RBD condition is followed.
After 3 or so calls with OTA that went in many ways possible (one agent just accepting Swiss's explanation, but not able to find same RBD even if it was clearly available; second agent not accepting my message from Swiss and trying to go by manual, but somehow interpreting alternative 3 in her own way etc.) I was almost ready to give up with a promise to myself to try to avoid this generally quite reasonable OTA in future (when things go or less normally that is), but decided to request talking to supervisor. After the nice lady heard the whole story about my learning path and phone experience, she just spent a few minutes re-reading the manual (I guess), asked me what dates I was looking at, checked that P bucket was available and went on to reissue my ticket for 2021. So, all in all, around 5 hours on Skype all together, but I've got what I'm sure I was entitled to. Still quite appreciative of a very reasonable supervisor and Swiss agent not trying to convince me that word Similar means pretty much anything.