<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ehe123:
With regard to the "waitlist" on KLM for a business class seat, I pulled the following from a letter that I wrote to Northwest in Dec., 1998. I am not sure that anything has changed:
I made reservations in August for my family to use award tickets to accompany me to Europe. There was great difficulty in finding seats on the KLM segments, and as a result we needed to take a 5:30am flight (KLM 1692) from Lisbon to Amsterdam on Monday, 30 November. Even then, we could only get confirmed Business Class seats for two people. My daughter was placed on a “waiting list” for a Business Class seat. Several times before 30 Nov. I asked Northwest customer service agents about the status of this segment, but was told that she was still wait listed, and there was nothing more that could be done until the flight.
When we arrived at the Lisbon airport, I asked the KLM agent at the check-in counter about the status of the wait list for my daughter. She said that there was no wait list, and my daughter has a coach class seat. After much fruitless discussion, I asked to speak with a supervisor, and was told that she would be at the gate. When I explained the problem to the KLM supervisor, she said that her ticket shows a Coach Class seat, and that is that. When I asked her why every other segment of my daughter’s ticket (there were six segments) was in either First Class or Business, she said that “maybe I did not have enough miles” for the entire trip in Business. Further discussion appeared pointless. We then boarded the plane, and were surprised to find that of the 17 Business Class seats, the only two that were occupied were by us! We spoke with the lead Flight Attendant, who was extremely kind and allowed us all to sit together in Business.
The main point of my writing this narrative is to suggest that in the future you not use the term “wait list” for Business Class on KLM flights, when KLM personnel insist that no such list exists. The subsequent refusal of KLM personnel to be accommodating is clearly out of your hands.
I received some boilerplate response from Northwest thanking me for sharing this with them...</font>
Nothing has changed - just ran the same drill on Jan 5 2004