T.W.O.:

Wow, what a trip and hassle.

As noted above, there are a variety of themes which you address. This would be good for a thread by itself.

However, I'd like to point out that CO still needs to get its international upgrade policy information/act together. Still. Still. Still.


[This message has been edited by JeffLewis2 (edited 11-09-2000).]

TW1,

Any MORE nasty remarks in your PNR?

Gee, and you seem like such a nice guy to me! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

Sounds like a terrible trip! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mad.gif

thesilb et al:
I am not arguing the upgrade issue on the LAX-HNL segment. CO has long ago put me on notice that this is not a complimentary upgrade. Why I bring this up is to point out that many CO telephone agents have no clue when it comes to upgrades, automated or otherwise. CO's ticket agents and gate agents similarly have problems understanding a seemingly clear rule in the book. GUM-TPE is not a BusinessFirst flight. Under my understanding of the terms and conditions, I should have been upgraded. The reason I post here is that I believe the failure of the system was a result of my paper ticket .

[This message has been edited by TransWorldOne (edited 11-09-2000).]

booner,

arturo has red rfc 1596 an et kno wher sez thet ef yu wan two "denie corntinintel the fredy" thet yu hav two hav a lemet on yur e-male adres.

------------------
Loving, Caring, Honest, Intelligent, Empathetic, Creative, and Giving.

Please let us know if you got the upgrade.....


And Boomer:

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[This message has been edited by NJDavid (edited 11-10-2000).]

sea, booner, arturo kno abot rfc's. arturo kno abot othr thengs, two. speleng knot won of thim, tho.

------------------
Loving, Caring, Honest, Intelligent, Empathetic, Creative, and Giving.

I checked ITN about an hour ago. F8 on my flight. Gee, maybe I really was upgraded. Call gold elite line. No, I wasn't upgraded. Agent asks if I had just bought my ticket? No, I bought my ticket October 6th. Agent says in a doubtful tone, "It looks as though you are eligible for an upgrade." Eventually she decides that appearances are correct, and manually upgrades me. I give her a very brief synopsys of yesterday's idiocy, and she says "Well, I don't know what that was all about. You should have been upgraded automatically on Thursday morning. I guess there are still a few bugs in the software."

I have gone beyond angry at this point.

We just learned another way you can get screwed by the new system, returning from Chile on F/C reward tickets, confirmed in coach, waitlisted for F/C for the last segment.

It seems that the waitlist needs to be cleared by human intervention, and the system ignores all reward tickets.

Passengers were given elite upgrades from the standby list, but Mr. and Mrs. Old Gold got to stay cozy in the back.

Got really COOL frozen chicken sandwiches too! My complements to the Chef.

Mr. & Mrs. Old Gold,

Glad to see y'all are home safe & sound. Sorry to hear about the wait-list situation. CO obviously has some work to do on the EUA. What puzzles me is that CO implemented the system, it appears, without testing some very obvious errors. Maybe CO just needs to "buy" NWA's system and fire all those programmers that wrote the code for theirs.

Honestly, has ANYONE received an adequate explanation from Continental on this issue?

David:

No, I haven't http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

I agree that CO dropped the ball badly. First, they had two weeks to read our comments about everything wrong with the program posted by Non-NonRev and they chose to ignore our comments. How could they not come up with these probroblems if they had only sat 20 elites in a room for 3 hours? I simply believe that they did not pay enough attention to details and assumed that they had thought of 99.9% of the problems when it looks more like that they missed a lot more. And of course, their best customers are paying for it.

[This message has been edited by Vulcan (edited 11-12-2000).]

Old Gold, just booked IAH-PTY-SCL and back, paper tickets (for 1 Jan). I can't bring up a seat chart for PTY-SCL, the agent says that COPA (I'm on CO codeshare anyway) doesn't select the plane until about 3 weeks before the flight! How many FC seats were there, and what route did you fly? Interested in hearing more details about your flight segments.

TransWorldOne:

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't enjoy the BF LAX-HNL segment. I've been on this flight twice in the past year, and had excellent food and service both times. Hopefully, what happened to you is the exception rather than the rule.

What happened to you regarding the GUM-TPE segment raises some issues.

1. Exactly which flights operated by Continental Micronesia (CS) are eligible for complimentary Elite upgrades? I always thought it was any flight that did not have a BusinessFirst cabin (that is, all flights except the non-stop HNL-GUM run). However, TransWorldOne was told that since the front of the cabin on GUM-TPE was sold as C, that flight is not eligible for Elite upgrades.

Kitty Hawk pointed out that the rules say that elite upgrades are valid "... on select flights within or between the Mid Pacific and Asia." The next sentence in the Elite Member's Guide reads "Continental ... flights ... within or between the Mid Pacific and Asia with a BusinessFirst cabin will not be eligible for Elite upgrades."

Note that it does not say all flights except those with a BF cabin are eligible. There are two separate statements: a) select flights are eligible for upgrades, and b) BF flights are not eligible. The Elite Guide doesn't directly address which non-BusinessFirst flights are eligible.

After reading TransWorldOne's message, I thought that perhaps flights where the front cabin is sold as C are not eligible, but those that are sold as A are, just like domestic US flights. However, I couldn't find any CS flights that are sold as A (I checked GUM to HKG, TPE, MNL, SPN, and several cities in Japan). So, if the "no upgrades if it's sold as C" is the rule, then this means that no CS flights are eligible. Does someone know the answer to this quandary?

2. Assuming that there are some CS flights where Elite upgrades are available, are these flights part of the EUA program, or are they still on the manual upgrade system? I seem to remember reading somewhere that CS flights were NOT part of the EUA, but of course I can't find this reference at the moment. If this is true, this could explain what happened to TransWorldOne. Let's assume that the GUM-TPE flight is eligible for Elite upgrades, but not part of the EUA. When asked, the agent at LAX may not have known that CS flights are not part of EUA, and therefore thought that there must be some reason why TransWorldOne did not get the upgrade, and then just guessed that it was because the front cabin was sold as C. It's quite possible that in the EUA training the mainland US airport people received (that is, don't do manual upgrades in advance - let the EUA system work) didn't mention the CS issue.

(Is this confusing enough?)