This is semi related but worth bringing up I think. I had an AS award with a long domestic flight on AA in first class which rarely has first class available on that route. A better connecting flight opened up, and in U/First class as originally only Y seats were available to meet that flight so I changed it online, making sure all segments were visible still when I made the change. Reason is that often Alaska's website will drop a segment if you aren't paying attention to changing a partner award.

So everything looked good with the change, except when I got the confirmation email I had duplicates of several flights. Contacted Alaska, after a lot of messing around they said it was all good and I'd get a new email shortly. The next day, no email, I looked up the reservation on AA's site to see what it was showing and the long domestic leg was in economy class instead of business class, the flight segment I hadn't even changed. There of course was no award space to rebook in easily. So I call up, and through a series of calls over the course of a several days I was outright lied to, ignored, misunderstood, told me they'd work on it to get me off the phone (and found out they didn't do anything after calling back a few days later when they still hadn't sent out a new confirmation email) and for those agents who eventually noticed that it was Alaska's fault, they couldn't do anything. The most "helpful" person, the highest level of person apparently that could do anything according to them, had called several people at AA to open space up by they said no. Not even put them on AS metal though that would be a huge downgrade over the 777 business class seating I picked for them.

Alaska's screw up downgraded a flight from nice lie-flat seating for some of my older side family members I wanted to treat to a nice flight, to regular coach and refused any sort of compensation or resolution. I'm pretty annoyed with them right now, DOT complaint I sent (why I'm not saying specifics) hasn't resulted in anything so far. And this wasn't even the only issue like this I've had in the last month. Another IT glitch when I bought an AS cash first class fare ended up not ticketing correctly. When I called to resolve it they quoted a price significantly higher to fix their own issue. Luckily the fare was still available so I had them refund and cancel it and I just booked it online again. Goes along well with my latest issue where I had to call in to make a change to a reservation as it locked me out of changes due to a schedule change, and the price to change it via the phone was $30 more than online was showing. Got a lot of excuses for that one by the agents, but it was just another screwed up AS IT issue that they have no interest in fixing, and lately has been costing me a lot.