Originally Posted by
rob_88
Update... so, I finally just gave up. I'm going to just travel as originally booked.
I'm curious if there's a path here for compensation from BA, as they've basically forced a fully flex ticket to be completely inflexible - in effect removing a key feature of the ticket I purchased. Especially given it was BA's fault (cancelling the outbound) which led to this. I might mull this over.
TLDR; Don't use travel agents if you need any kind of booking flexibility. Definitely scrapping the Amex Plat now.
Chatting to my partner about this... she's a 20 year+ travel sales/support veteran (and still works in native command-line Galileo "because it's quicker").
The IRROPS is muddying the water here. The root cause is combining the ITX ticket with the GUF2.
The control of the ticket will have passed not at the point the IRROPS occurred, but at the point where the GUF2 was applied. That would have caused BA to exchange the ticket for a new one to reflect the new cabin.
At that point, AMEX (or other TA of choice) lose control of the ticket to the airline, and as explained up-thread, that's a one-way street.
If this had been a published fare but ticketed by AMEX, and not an ITX fare, your request change of return would not have been a problem. BA could see the fare construction, calculate any deviation from it as a result of your requested change, and perform any additional collection due, if any.
But it's an ITX fare, so voluntary changes to those are done between you and the TA. But that door got closed when the GUF2 was processed.
My partner does agree with what the Gold line person said - if AMEX were willing to copy & paste the fare construction into the comments section of the PNR (which they still have write access to), BA can pick that up and someone in ticketing ought to (and this is BA going "over and above") be able to reverse engineer the pricing and process your change. But she's actually surprised that BA will apply an upgrade instrument to an ITX fare in this way, exactly because of this sort of problem occurring down the line.
Unfortunately it's not what you wanted to hear, but that's the way it is.