An upgrade is not always a good thing. This is a brief cautionary tale about my latest flight, which has ended up leaving me rather annoyed at BA - to the point that I'm definitely going to be flirting with other airlines in the coming year.

I was travelling from LAX to LHR in WT+ with a colleague. We checked in online and snagged 28B and 28D (28B for myself), and left for the airport quite happy.

On arriving and picking up our boarding passes, I had been upgraded to 17F. My colleague was left in 28D. Not ideal for him, but he didn't begrudge me the upgrade, so we just said thank you and went on our way.

At boarding however, my pass was rejected and a rather abrubt member of stuff just looked at the computer and scribbled 29G onto my pass. On being pressed for an explanation they just said that the flight was full so I had to be moved back.

I tried to get them to move me back to my original seat, but they weren't having it.

To be honest I was a lot more annoyed at losing 28B than I was at not getting the upgrade. Plus the complete lack of a simple apology or explanation - I mean how hard would it have been to say "We're sorry Mr _Sin, but we've had to find some extra seats in CW and have to move you back to WT+". I mean it's the class I've paid for, so it's not like I'm after compensation - but some basic manners wouldn't go amiss.

So I've just had a really rather unpleasant flight thanks to unhelpful staff and a bizarre upgrade policy. Rubbing salt into the wound was that 28B was in fact occupied by an upgrade from WT who hadn't boarded when I got on, and could easily have been moved to 29G without knowing any different. As a full flexible fare paying silver-card holder, I would've thought I'd have at least a little more priority than being shunted out of my prefered seat for a random upgrade.

Also, whereas the staff barely even spoke to me all flight (not much in the way of drinks - and in fact I didn't even get offered dinner until someone noticed that they'd just missed me out and done everyone else in WT+ first), the chap in 28B seemed to have a constant swarm of FA's sorting out his every wish.

Naturally the CSD gave the chap a feedback form to fill in... I'm sure that will be a glowing report to give the crew a nice warm fuzzy feeling - at my expense.

They've basically pulled a bait and switch to get me into a bad seat and make a good seat available for someone to fill in a nice report. I intent to try to offset that by sending in my own feedback on the way it was handled.