It's not a common experience at all. It sounds like there's some kind of phantom inventory showing for the RC. Then you got the double whammy of phone reps who failed to spot the issue or to be honest with you about what was going on. You didn't do anything wrong here, and those phone reps should be ashamed of themselves for not being candid with you or trying to actually fix the problem. I would just add for future reference the caveat that the inability to book the room with points online was a bit of a red flag that there was an inventory problem that was not going to be easily solved.