I had the worst experience ever booking a flight and cancelling it.

A while back Continental.com removed the ability to "hold" a reservation for 24 hours - now they let OnePass members (supposedly) cancel a reservation and get a refund after 24 hours.

While trying to do just that - get a refund after 4 hours - for a pretty expensive ticket ($2500 or so), the Continental.com Web site elected to cancel the flight (so far so good) but rather than refunding the purchase amount to instead "credit the value towards a future flight". Now that's great, I now got $2500 "credit" (and would have to pay a change fee).

Posting a note on Continental.com to Customer Care didn't help - 10 days passed and not a reply (I did check "please contact me").

Calling the reservation desk (Web support) yielded an agent who claimed I intentionally elected to receive "credit" versus a "refund" (like anyone would do this), and was not willing a refund. He did waive the change fee though (sweet but no cigar). Calling Customer Care yielded no results, with even less empathy from the agent ("it says here that you hit the cancel button instead of the refund button"). Now, I do recall being confused about those Web buttons, but that was back in 1996 or 1997, not recently :-)

So, you might expect Continental to treat 5-years-in-a-row OnePass Platinum customers like they could make a reservation, but I guess it's hard giving away $2500, admitting that there's some nasty bug on the Web site, or just being courteous.

The worst part is that as a Continental OnePass Platinum customer, it's not that I wouldn't normally spend $2500 at some point in the near future, but obviously now I'm stuck with a credit I can't even expense until I use it, and with a guaranteed mess once I try to re-book it.

I guess it's about time to start looking for airline programs which let you preserve your Platinum status when you move over.

Kudos, Continental.com folks - way to go!