Cheap Upgrade or Error
 

Hi,

I booked MAN to GIG and when I went to upgrade reservation it offered me the out bound upgrade for £3,000 plus and the return for £10 so I thought it was too good to be true and clicked it ..

I was able to reserve seats in first for the trip back and now worry that one of two things may happen . 1. CO will tell em it is an error and put me back in coach or 2. they will take £3000 off my credit card instead of the £10 cos it was an error.

I could argue it was an offer which I accepted and therefor we have a contract.

What it likely to happen?

I called reservations making an enquiry about a date change that I did not proceed with and the agent said my resrvation was out of sync and not been ticketed ..

I printed off the flights, seating showing in First for return flight and price paid for the trip. Would CO honour this?

What is the routing on the way back?
Sometimes, if there is a domestic segment (e.g, IAH-EWR on your way back), then, that is the segment that prices out to "first" at a low rate... so essentially pax are paying for the upgrade for the domestic segment. This is kind of a bug in the system.
Still 10 pounds seems too low.

I am not sure how this popped up for you. Good for you printing everything out.

We will see what the experts say?

I hope the experts can get back to me on this..I would like to know what to say to the gate agent when they try to knock me down to coach

Two thoughts...
1) What booking class was the return flight in originally? Is it for all three flights or just for one of them?

2) CO is pretty good about honoring their errors when they make them. The few recent "quirks" that have cropped up have all been honored if ticketed. This includes bargain priced (or free) BF upgrades so I wouldn't worry about that aspect of things.

Hi sbm12 If i look at the reservation it now shows the class of fare as W W W on the way out and C C D on the way back

When I view receipt it show W for all 6 flights and the receipt shows seat allocation as coach on the way out and first on the way back

How will I know if the flight is ticketed ? Is the itinerary confirmation that it is ticketed?

Well, a W-> C/D upgrade for GBP 10 is almost certainly an error. Congrats on scoring that one. :eek: :cool:

If you look at the reservation online and it says something like "This reservation was eTicketed and confirmed on Fri., Mar. 19, 2010 at 12:51 p.m. Central Time," then you should be good to go.

I have it

This reservation was eTicketed and confirmed on Thu., Apr. 29, 2010 at 4:59 a.m. Central Time.

Happy Days ..Rio here I come..

Many thanks sbm12

Seems like it's a huge score to me.

Note that I believe it's relatively difficult in the age of e-tickets for a gate agent or even a check-in agent to see exactly how much you paid for your ticket. It's probably even harder on a multi-segment flight that involved a paid upgrade and an exchange of the original ticket.

So if CO somehow does discover this "error" it would be by someone doing some advance auditing of their processes. In which case they'd likely contact you in advance.

But of course CO Insider knows who you are now, so beware! (Though if anyone would be willing to honor the error it would be him and his staff).

Wow! Congrats OP! You did good on this one!

I would qualify that to say that CO has been good at honoring their errors when CO Insider is aware of the error.

If he's not involved, your experience can vary substantially, as nobody accessible via the front line channels is empowered to do much.

The buy-up links periodically generate errors. I had one that offered me to buy-up for $0 or 72 miles (or some equally random amount). I, of course, clicked to agree to the buy-up and I flew up-front. :-::-:

ETA: I took screen shots of every page I went through in case it tried to bait and switch, or in case I was downgraded.

I printed off every page so hope it will be ok...

This is the first upgrade I have had for a year so I feel I deserve a bit of luck ..

In previous year I got maybe 80% of flights upgraded

I got well and truly stuffed..

I am at GIG now went to check in and they refused to give me the first class seats..they know they made an error and then wanted me to pay the difference.. They took my money and eticketed and confirmed my reservation in first but failed to honour it.

Continental had 2 months to inform me of the error and even when i flew out from manchester the agent there said ti would be honoured as he had nothing on the system to say any different .

You can imagine how absolutely crap I feel ...Had they told me earlier they were not going to honour their error I would not have done the trip ...Prcies have come down and I could have done the same trip for a lower price on different dates..

Also now i have 2 overnight flights and cant choose my seats in coach..

The stafff at GIG put me throught to a supervisor at Houston Ronnie armstrong who told me the only eway I was going to fly was in coach...

You messed up Continnetal ..I have spent the last 4 years trying hard to keep Platinum and when I thought you were going to come through for me you failed..

Why could you not tell me 2 months ago you were not going to honour your error..

Now I have a hell of a flight back feeling terrible.

Not cool. I'm not huge on taking advantage of error rates although I have been a beneficiary of one myself :cool: but I think CO should've sat you up front on this one. Especially since it's the return. If they had an issue, they could've at least handled it prior to the outbound.

Thanks for the support ..you cant imagine how crap i feel right now//