My story for the day. I travel CO a fair bit (100K+ flown miles a year), and everytime I book an international flight using miles for the upgrade, something goes wrong in the exchange, requiring many phone calls to get things squared away, and follow-up calls to mop up and clean afterwards. In the end, things usually turn out all right, not without losing a few years of life expectancy in the process.

This time, I wanted to go from BOS-GRU-BOS using miles for the upgrade to BF on the EWR-GRU-EWR legs (or H/K to R in the lingo). So I call up a few days ago to make my arrangements, was placed on the cleared upgrade outbound, and waitlisted to BF return, with an H fare basis. Fair enough, will play the HoKeY lottery for the return.

A day later, I call up to make a change in both the inbound and outbound dates in the itinerary and was given another 24 hours. The day after I call again to make another change, and am told that my reservation has been "cancelled" since I didn't buy it within 24 hours. (Apparently my second call didn't "take". I guess my second call was a training exercise or something). This is not starting on the right foot. So I tell the CSR that as long as my new desired dates were available with the upgrades, I could be kept happy. So, he gives me my new dates and an upgrade on the outbound, waitlisted on the return, for the same H fare. Gives me 48 hours to buy ticket.

Forward 40 hours later. Call up to buy ticket, I am told that I have a reservation with my ORIGINAL outbound date and my UPDATED return date, all at the same H fare, in COACH, no upgrades anywhere in the horizon. Now this is where I lose it. We have a bit of back and forth, and I am not happy about this, raising of voices, veiled threats, the whole works, but no foul language or personal attacks (leave those for last, when there is no hope of getting things fixed).

It gets better, since the CSR claims the record said that I called a day earlier to make these changes, which I certainly didn't.
I think the line "why would I pay an H fare to fly in coach with an outbound date that I am not interested in, when I can screw up just as badly and fly coach for $300 less on a Q/T fare by buying it from the website (and get bonus miles for using it)?" made the CSR realize that I wasn't playing upset to get away with something, but I was genuinely miffed over this comedy of errors.

So the CSR puts me on hold, comes back 5 minutes later and says that a supervisor has reinstated my flights with the right dates. I ask the CSR if that means I am confirmed in BF on the outbound and waitlisted for the return, as I had expected. The reply is: "no, you are upgraded to BF on both legs". That was a pleasant surprise. Bought the ticket, and had the confirmation e-mail in 10 minutes, with the right info, for once.

Now, I have to say that I am impressed at CO's ability to do the right thing here. Their recovery from an embarassing fumble was very good. Now, if they could just not screw it up so often on the first try...