Continental Exposed
 

Folks, in the coming weeks, I will be exposing Continental Airlines.

This week, I will start with EUA.

Have you noticed that earlier this year, battlefield upgrades were extremely hard to clear, even for Platinum Elites? You saw a large amount of first class inventory available prior to departure yet at the 24 hour mark, F inventory went down to almost 0 instantly?

Continental screwed up big time.

Earlier this year, Continental switched their fare classes from the old booking classes to the current F, A, C, D, W, S, T, L etc in order to match Star Alliance. What you didn't know was that during the conversion process, they screwed up.

We all know the old F was the inventory for EUA/Elite upgrades. If F was available at the EUA window or at check in, it was yours. R was the discounted first class code.

The new booking classes, however, changed the F to full fare first class and R to EUA/elite upgrade. They changed Continental.com successfully. Unforunately, they did not change the upgrade algorithm correctly on pda.continental.com.

What does that mean? If an elite member checked in on pda.continental.com, the system automatically gave the message "As an elite member, you are eligible for an upgrade, if there is a seat available, would you like the upgrade?" Most people would click yes. And if they did, because Continental didn't bother changing the algorithm on pda.continental.com, any elite who was eligible for upgrade was upgraded INSTANTLY when they clicked that button. pda.continental.com was still setup to look for F inventory to upgrade (the old upgrade bucket), instead of the new R. And since F was the full fare booking class, if there was a seat available, pda.continental.com would upgrade the elite.

This resulted in Silver elites beating Gold and Platinum elites during battlefield upgrade when they checked in on pda.continental.com anytime from 24 hours to 2 hours prior to departure. So, those poor platinums waited and waited at the gate only to see F inventory went down one by one until they lost the upgrade. @:-)

This occured for several months. Continental finally caught in in late April/Early May and fixed the problem.

Many people knew about this issue on Flyertalk but no one bothered to mention anything. Because, they would lost their freebie upgrades.

More Continental Exposed to come next week...

Yarr, I knew them Long John Silvers were after me upgrades, matey. http://www.rolleye.com/pirate.gif

http://rolleye.com/angelpray.jpg gives me upgradez.

Excellent post. I anxiously await your reply.

</sarcasm>




I don't even know where to begin... :rolleyes:

How about some info. on the boring "cold plates" please

You're reporting on a loophole that was open for two months and which has now been closed for 6? :confused:

Thanks for the breaking news.

I can haz upgrade? :-:

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9630/4.7.1.40 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

Popcorn, table 1.

Coming to read daily FT posts is making me feel more and more like I am having a Groundhog Day :rolleyes:

you can haz cheezburger

:eek:I blame this on the EWR attitude:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: This was so much fun I can't wait till the next edition. I say we suggest the tittle for the next post. I will start: "CO EXPOSED: HOT TOWELS AT MEAL TIME BURN SENSITIVE HANDS! TA DA DA!"

Assuming everything in here is 100% accurate, I don't see how it reflects poorly on CO beyond the fact that an IT glitch occurred. It sounds like they encountered an IT glitch and fixed it. Granted, it impacted the EUA system that we all hold dear, but I seem to recall CO Insider even mentioning a few months back that there was an issue with EUA, and that measures were being taken to fix it. It would make sense for CO not to publicize the exact glitch, as that would only encourage more people to abuse the system whilst the error was being fixed. Granted, I guess CO could have just suspended EUAs altogether during the bug-fixing period. I can only imagine the apocalyptic scenes on the CO Forum had that happened.

Sounds like a few bad eggs may have kept this to themselves and abused it. I'd say that reflects more on the people who did abuse the system than on CO.

I thought this was going to be about new uniforms for the FAs.

:eek: I don't even want to see some of them exposed! AT ALLLLLL. We are coming on the winter season, hoping they will cover up some more.

Some of them?