That was exactly what I thought. "Great, I accept the offer. Please stay online while I pay so you can issue the ticket immediately"

Will be interesting to see if it works or if they refuse/can't do it. Someone reported that they claimed "upgrades are manually handled". SAS has a similar process, where the agent to talk to is booking the award during the call and then says they will send it for ticketing, sometimes referred to as "the queue". This fails very very occasionally, mostly when the queue takes more time than the airline allows for a reservation to be held without finalising.

If AY has implemented something like that, then the agents are not allowed to ticket, only to book. And then for some reason it seems different agents are able to book using the same U and when your booking finally makes it through the queue there is no U left and all they care to do about it is to apologize for any inconvenience...

If this is the set-up then we will soon know, because the CS agent will then not be able to influence creation of "the payment link" or ticketing and thus will refuse to wait online.