Originally Posted by PDXPremier

Well, it finally happened....after many flights, I finally experienced my first involuntary denied boarding on Alaska (although technically it was my wife and daughter). I know being involuntary denied board is relatively rare, I suppose if it were going to happen, it would be during this "rough" time AS seems to be going through. OK....time for the mini-trip report: I was booked on the 2:30pm MCI-SEA yesterday (1/17) and at the time of booking, there was enough U space available to upgrade two of my family of 4 with GGUs so I upgraded my wife and daughter while my son and I booked PC (waitlisted for First). Days prior, I noticed that the 7am MCI-SEA flight cancelled and the 2:30pm we were booked on switched from a 737-900 to an -800. Thankfully I didn't book row 4 and my wife and daughter's seats in F seemed to be intact. Last Friday (3 days prior to departure) I got a call from AS telling me that their seats were in fact no longer available due to the aircraft swap although I suspect it also had to do with the passengers from the 7am being rebooked onto the 2:30pm flight. The agent said there were no seats in coach to move them to and we had two options: #1: Fly a day earlier or later (which was not an option) or #2: Drive to STL or OMA and catch an AS flight from there. The agent said we would be provided with $650 in AS credit (per person) if we chose option #1 and $350 in AS credit (per person) if we chose option #2. Both the OMA and STL flights had confirmed First seats available for my wife and daughter and my son and I would be waitlisted. OMA was a lot closer so we ended up dropping the rental car there (which about doubled the price of the car rental). As it turned out, although there were only a few F seats left on the OMA-SEA flight, my son and I cleared into F so all 4 of us flew to SEA in First which would not have happened on the fully booked (or maybe even overbooked) MCI flight. We ended up connecting with our originally booked SEA-PDX so we arrived home on time. Some questions I had....

#1...Is there any "official" protocol for bumping F passengers? As my wife is also a 75K, I figured she was bumped out by paid F passengers or 75Ks that booked prior?
#2...I asked about being booked on an AA flight from MCI but was told that isn't possible since these seats were booked with companion certificates and therefore the new flights could only be AS metal flights--really? Even during overbooking or irrops? Our outbound AM flight from SEA-MCI was cancelled and the AS agent easily booked us on AS from PDX-ORD and then onto an AA flight to MCI although that was an AS award ticket.
#3...Would it be appropriate to turn-in the rental car receipt for reimbursement of the extra cost of having to provide our own transportation to OMA due to the IDB?

When it was all said and done, despite having to switch to completely different flights (both directions), I felt like AS handled things very well considering the circumstances...hopefully their operation will improve and return to some semblance of "normal" in the next few weeks.