Originally Posted by
puddy
But how was your award ticket done? Did you book EWR-HKG in coach and and HKG-EWR in Standard BF? If so, maybe that was the problem?
I think what happened was that FatMan wanted standard BF to HKG and while he was able to secure a seat for the return, only standard Y was open for the outbound. When he asked the agent about, for lack of a better term, "forcing" out a BF reward (which is essentially what plan B is) but having him seated in Y for the outbound the agent said it could not be done (or more specifically, it could only be done at the easy pass level).
My guess is that the agent did not have a firm grasp on the process as it's somewhat obscure. After I saw the post I called in myself to talk to an agent and at first he thought it could not be done but he double checked and then corrected himself...and helped me reference the instructions so that anyone else in a similar situation can quickly bring the agent up to speed on what needs to be done.