I know Scott and crew have been working on this. Delta has a policy in place to cover fare upgrades and downgrades - their policy allows you to rebook the same flights (no flight/date changes) into a higher class without incurring a change fee, including their A class to book into FC.

The sticking point with CO was the risk of abuse. At DL, apparently their system is setup to retain the original restrictions on a ticket - so you can't book a L fare, rebook it into full Y, then make unlimited changes or get a refund. Their system will assess the change fee if you try to redo the dates or flights, and will only refund the ticket value above the original L fare (less the change fee) if you downgrade.

I don't know how much work is involved in programming CO's systems to handle this process but it was apparently more than just a rule change as they were legitimately concerned about the risk of abuse unless they had a way to track the original ticket restrictions.

I was hoping this would have been fixed by now, but apparently no dice. Your options are to either keep calling the Elite desk until you get an agent willing to waive the fee (most likely if you're booking into A class, not just moving up a few fare classes), or book this type of corporate travel on Delta and rebook into their A class for free and collect the service class bonuses until we leave ST. That's what I had been doing in the past - booking on Delta and re-issuing in A, but only with their Medallion desk as the Indian agents are totally clueless about this rule (and everything else too).

If they only allowed this within the first 24 hours, they wouldn't have to worry about abuse.

You can refund any ticket in 24 hours anyway, so if you're upgrading a < 24 hour old non-refundable to a refundable, you could allow the customer to have full refundability (it would essentially be the same as if the customer had refunded the original and bought the refundable ticket in the first place, so the airline shouldn't really care).

Folks the 24 hour grace is only for tickets bought on Continental.com, which had it been purchashed there there would be no issue with the EQP credits in the first place. This is a problem I run into all the time as well, I usually offer to pay the difference to the travel department when they book the ticket, if they can't or won't book it on continental.com.

CO's systems already do this. You cannot use a non-refundable fare to change to a refundable fare. If you do, the new ticket will also be non-refundable.

For example, I buy an L fare...cancel it and then use the remaining credit on that PNR to buy a Y fare. My new Y fare ticket will be non-refundable.

I found this out the hard way a few months ago....

Nope. They changed this. The 24-hour policy now applies to co.com and call center reservations. It does not apply to 3rd party bookings that I can see, but it is not only online bookings anymore.

https://www.continental.com/web/en-U...romoCode=A5753

Exactly - this was the problem yesterday - the CSR knew and quoted that rule :(