Web site pricing problems and related consequences!
 

Last night I was trying to book on the CO web site an itinerary from LAX to LON and AMS to IAH. I requested economy in my search criteria and while the first leg came up as expected, the AMS to IAH leg came up as BizFirst and was priced at some $3,500. This didn’t make sense because I could see there were plenty of coach seats available on that flight. I tried multiple times but nothing changed so I gave up and thought “Oh well yet another example of CO’s sub standard web site!”. So then around midday I tried again hoping that last night was just a temporary glitch and I was pleasantly surprised to see a fare of just over $1000 come up which I snagged straight away and put in on 24hr hold. When I went to pick my seats I noticed that the AMS to IAH leg was ticketed in Z class ie Biz Class and I was able to select a BF seat. I was pretty pleased! A few hours later I decided I was in a position to go ahead with the ticketing, pulled up the reservation and purchased it. Then everything started to go downhill! About 20mins later I received an email from CO with the words “Ticket Issuance Delay”, waited just over an hour heard nothing so decided to call CO.COM support. I was told that the reason for the delay was because the amount that my credit card was going to be charged did not equal what I had been quoted and it needed manual intervention to correct. The amount that was to be charged to my card (Yes you guessed it!) was to be $3500! Then I was told that CO have been aware of problems like this for several days and had put out a communication internally that stated that if a passenger experienced something like I have described on the CO website and had REQUESTED economy but was issued BIZ FIRST class then it would NOT be honored and they would be have to be seated in economy!! I couldn’t believe my ears! I won’t bore you with the details of what happened from that point onwards but you can imagine I was pretty upset. My position was that I bought the ticket in good faith,(I had a printed copy of the reservation that proved what had happened) and that I expected CO to honor its commitment of seating me in BF but they wouldn’t budge. In the end, after 86 mins on the phone, I decided to use some miles to upgrade but I feel pretty grieved over the situation.

On a side note, the CSR was very respectful and sympathized with my situation. He promised to report it to higher up and suggested I report it too which I will do.

It seems like ever since they enhanced the reservation interface on continental.com last week it has been belching out strange itineraries. I don't know if it's related, but when I talked to a reservation agent yesterday, she had mentioned that they had just updated the reservation software.

Are you going to email or call customer care?. Maybe you can propose having some of the miles you used to upgrade credited back to you for your inconvenience.

I've been having similar problems with my itineraries. Since the schedule button now lists by the lowest prices automatically, I cannot get certain flights to show up even if they are a little more expensive.

For example, I have been trying (unsuccessfully I might add) to book a trip from EWR-OGG next February for a Fri-Saturday trip (8 days). I cannot get the website to pull up the flight through IAH for the life of me. Everything shows up as a connection in IAH and LAX, LAX (connecting to DL), or a connection in HNL. It's driving me nuts!

Maybe this is how CO plans to prevent people from getting 100% EQMs. Just make it impossible to book anything.

Hmmm. Didn't sound like good faith to me. Unless I'm misreading you, it seemed you were trying to benefit from what you knew to be a glitch in their reservation system. Along with an apology CAL should certainly allow you to cancel or change your reservation once without penalty, but I don't think they owe you the Bizfirst seat.