There really is no good way to get a change of philospohy. I could think of a lot of ways CO could make life easier for true plats to upgrade internationally, but many of us have written letters till we are blue in the face without any results. From a business standpoint, I can only tell you that we could only impact the situation if we had real economic power to move big international business from CO to someone else. Obvioulsy, we don't. We are really just a fly on the elephants a**, and the powers that be don't care about us.
Fot the time being, I personally fly NW because I know in advance that I will be in a BC seat, rather than sweating it out. I know quite a few other CO FTers that do the same. Note that this pertains to flights to Asia and NOT Europe. CO could make life easier if we had access to view "R" inventory on-line like we can view NW "D" and "I", but I wouldn't hold my breath. This allow for detailed planning BEFORE calling CO to have all my ducks in a row, rather than get some "anti-ResAgent86" on the line and wasting 1/2 hour of both of our time. (I am reminded of the International Res Agent I spent time on the phone with the other night who insisted that CO had no thru tariff between GUM and SIN, via NRT, despite the fact that CO.COM and Travelocity both showed it.) On the soap box again.


[This message has been edited by Vulcan (edited 10-26-2002).]