A little update on the above post:
after making the award reservation (of course I put on hold, you never know what the She.E.O. may decide otherwise
) I made arrangements for my Z ticket in parallel. On the day the award had to be ticketed I forgot to call in to release for ticketing. I realized this at 23.30 EST and made a frantic call to the US SEN, which of course had already closed for the day. So I proceeded to call the dreaded CPT line. The agent took all the details and supposedly sent the reservation for ticketing. 3 days went by and the reservation was still alive on checkmytrip and LH.com, but no ticket number or confirmation appeared. On day 4 the reservation was cancelled. A few missed heartbeats later (EF.com showed no I availability as expected) I called the SEN line and it turns out the CPT agent made some mistake and the booking never made it to ticketing
Surprisingly the agent managed to make a new booking and reinstate all I segments except for the first one which was waitlisted with a note to RM to release an I seat into inventory because LH made a mistake. A few agonizing days of waiting later (in the meantime the flight went from C9D9Z9 to C9D5Z2) the WL cleared last night^ Three cheers to the US SEN line!
