I currently have a Newark to LV trip booked for mid-December, Thursday to Sunday. I used mileage to upgrade the Newark to LV flight and I am waitlisted for the LV to Newark flight. While looking around on the CO site I saw that an upgrade was available on Monday, same flight time. I called CO to see how much it would be to upgrade and was told with the far difference and change fee it would be $220. I told her that I was going to do it, but I had paid a $50 fee on the original flight. She told me to hold on while she had that part of it removed. She told me plenty of seats available in first. She gets back on the phone and she tells me that the fare is now gone. What! I just told her that I want the seat. Then she tells me that she has to rebook the original flight. I'm now looking things up on the computer and it looks like my seat is gone to. She says that it is but to hold on she has to talk to a supervisor to get it back. Needless to say I was not happy. She did get my seat back but I feel that there were some shenanigans going on. How can you cancel the original seat and not put some kind of hold on the reservation that I am making. I can understand if a seat that you want is gone, but the reservation. Isn't there a way to hold the reservation, especially if you cancelled the first one. Anyway, do I have any recourse. I know I should just be happy that I have my original seat back, but I just feel that something is not right. I should have gone with my initial feeling when this agent answered the phone that I was not talking to someone that was too sharp. Thanks for listening and any advice.

Technically, while the agent was slow, you don't have a deal until it tickets.

You might have been able to escalate to a supv on that call to see if they could force you into that fare bucket. You can try again now, but without the agent to explain what happened, it might be difficult. Though the quoted fare may be in the history.

You'd be at the mercy of CO's goodwill, though, because technically, it was not sold in, so it wasn't yours.

A good agent would have confirmed it in before killing the original one. That said, in other circumstances, having an agent like this can work to your advantage.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to "shenanigans" ... It just sounds like that agent needs to be retrained. Yeah, it sucks to have your upgrade seat vanish in mid-booking, but it's happened to me and I'm sure it happens to all of us. We all know how finicky Revenue Management can be with the R bucket, and it sounds like that's exactly what happened to the OP.