TransWorldOne:

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't enjoy the BF LAX-HNL segment. I've been on this flight twice in the past year, and had excellent food and service both times. Hopefully, what happened to you is the exception rather than the rule.

What happened to you regarding the GUM-TPE segment raises some issues.

1. Exactly which flights operated by Continental Micronesia (CS) are eligible for complimentary Elite upgrades? I always thought it was any flight that did not have a BusinessFirst cabin (that is, all flights except the non-stop HNL-GUM run). However, TransWorldOne was told that since the front of the cabin on GUM-TPE was sold as C, that flight is not eligible for Elite upgrades.

Kitty Hawk pointed out that the rules say that elite upgrades are valid "... on select flights within or between the Mid Pacific and Asia." The next sentence in the Elite Member's Guide reads "Continental ... flights ... within or between the Mid Pacific and Asia with a BusinessFirst cabin will not be eligible for Elite upgrades."

Note that it does not say all flights except those with a BF cabin are eligible. There are two separate statements: a) select flights are eligible for upgrades, and b) BF flights are not eligible. The Elite Guide doesn't directly address which non-BusinessFirst flights are eligible.

After reading TransWorldOne's message, I thought that perhaps flights where the front cabin is sold as C are not eligible, but those that are sold as A are, just like domestic US flights. However, I couldn't find any CS flights that are sold as A (I checked GUM to HKG, TPE, MNL, SPN, and several cities in Japan). So, if the "no upgrades if it's sold as C" is the rule, then this means that no CS flights are eligible. Does someone know the answer to this quandary?

2. Assuming that there are some CS flights where Elite upgrades are available, are these flights part of the EUA program, or are they still on the manual upgrade system? I seem to remember reading somewhere that CS flights were NOT part of the EUA, but of course I can't find this reference at the moment. If this is true, this could explain what happened to TransWorldOne. Let's assume that the GUM-TPE flight is eligible for Elite upgrades, but not part of the EUA. When asked, the agent at LAX may not have known that CS flights are not part of EUA, and therefore thought that there must be some reason why TransWorldOne did not get the upgrade, and then just guessed that it was because the front cabin was sold as C. It's quite possible that in the EUA training the mainland US airport people received (that is, don't do manual upgrades in advance - let the EUA system work) didn't mention the CS issue.

(Is this confusing enough?)