I tried to book a flight using and H fare (because I wanted to upgrade with miles) from EWR to NCE (Nice, France) which showed up fine on co.com as EWR-CDG and CDG to EWR. The flight priced OK but when I went to purchase, I received an error message saying "We're sorry, but continental.com was unable to complete your purchase. Please try your purchase later or call 1-800-300-1547 for assistance." I called the number listed and they immediately transferred me to international with a long wait time. SO I called back on the elite line and got an agent.

The agent couldn't get it to work either. They couldn't even get it to price.The problem was that (upgrade or not), the H fare was only applicable to the EWR-CDG portion and from CDG to NCE it would be coach because it's an Air France code share(which was fine with me) that doesn't have an H fare.

I then went to ITA and was able to price it the same as I was on CO.cOM. ITA however showed that the AF portion was an M fare. I called back the CO elite desk and asked the agent to try again. She initially ignored my suggestion about the M fare and couldn't get it to price using the CO codeshare flight number(except as a very expensive combination of fares). Eventually, she took my suggestion and tried pricing using the AF flight number and an M fare class, and to her suprise, it priced perfectly.

This is obviously a problem with CO's internal systems more than CO.COM. I assume that CO.COM does everything right and it prices correctly, but when CO.COM goes back to the internal systems to book it runs into the same problems the agent had.