This is my first true nightmare dealing with the ICC I called the international award desk and was routed to India. I wanted to make a very simple change: I have an F award MUC-GRU-EZE-GRU-MUC but the GRU-EZE leg was booked in Y because there was no C/F availability at time of booking. I saw in ANA tool that both C and F have now opened, so I simply wanted to change the cabin to F, or C if for any reason F was not available.

I explained this to the agent as clearly as I could. I though she actually had understood. She went ahead and made the change. As she was reading over the itinerary to me I realized she had changed the return EZE-GRU instead of GRU-EZE. I asked at least three times: is this flight you are telling me about from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires or from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo? She answered every time that it is from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo.

According to ANA there was still availability in F for EZE-GRU in my original dates. Had not there been availability, I would have been royally screwed (or so I thought, read on to see what happened).

Instead of hanging up I made the mistake of trying to make the agent understand what I wanted to do originally and what she had done instead. It was pointless. She had trouble even reading the itinerary to me. She insisted that the MUC-GRU flight was "Munich to Buenos Aires" (the arrival time she quoted is my arrival in GRU). It was impossible to make her understand that I was flying from MUC to GRU and then from GRU to EZE.

At that point I didn't know if only the EZE-GRU leg had been messed up, or the whole itinerary, because what she was reading to me didn't make any sense. I thought I did manage to put EZE-GRU back into the date I wanted - which was one day before my original date. Indeed, she told me: I have made the change and now you are flying from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo on xxx date - the right date).

However, after hanging up I logged in into the bomb to check the end result of these changes, and to my astonishment she had changed GRU-EZE, not EZE-GRU. EZE-GRU stayed exactly the same. In other words, she initially made the change I wanted, but told me not once but many times that "you are now departing from Buenos Aires and arriving in Sao Paulo" .

She did offer my a rental car though . I guess that had I accepted she would have booked a car in Sao Paulo when I'm in Buenos Aires .

I'm going to call the 1K line now and try to put everything back into place. Thankfully these GRU-EZE-GRU flights are usually open, but this could have potentially destroyed this carefully crafted award.

This tops everything I have read about the ICC. Not being able to understand or read correctly an itinerary, and repeteadly telling me that a flight was from A to B when in fact it was from B to A - this is too much.

I was very lucky that in this particular case the damage could be controlled, but this is absolutely pathetic and can only imagine the amount of trouble she is creating right now for another person .