Have a quick question - last week I got the go ahead to fly home early from work so I switched my normal LAX-DTW redeye flight to a 1 pm flight from SNA-DTW through MSP. The flight change cost me about $100 out of pocket which I was happy to pay and fully understood as I was switching airports and the desk waived the normal fee due to my PM status.

But the other effect from this change was to my return flight to LAX, on Monday. I was flying in on the evening flight from DTW-LAX and already had a confirmed upgrade - the representative at the desk told me in order to switch my initial flight I would have to forfeit the confirmed upgrade on the Monday evening flight.

That confused me as it didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense but I agreed to it because quite honestly I just wanted to go home early. And I ended up having to use a RUC to get my upgrade back on Monday (which took me 3 different calls to the MD for them to code it right but that's a whole other complaint.)

Anyone have experience with this? I don't have a problem if it is their policy but given how frequently I've run into representatives at the MD simply not knowing how to input things, wondering if the one I talked to gave me good info or not.

I've run into situations where changing my outgoing flight changed the ticket class of my return. Did you have a Y ticket that changed to something else when you did the change? That would explain why a confirmed upgrade (from the full Y fare) might disapear if it became a Q fare or something like that.

Nope checked that, my class was the same before and after (wasn't a Y to begin with.) I got the upgrade because I have PM and the flight wasn't close to sold out - when I made my flight change half of first class was still open.

That's happened to me.

Yes - so I always buy one-way tix if there is no price difference. Though admittedly, when I did book RT and this happened, I generally went to top of list with an additional upgrade available so I am not sure that I have ever truly lost upgrade. If anyone knows anyway around this issue, I too would love to know (other than WFBF which is sometimes do...)

in general, (number of open front cabin seats on the map) >= (number of front cabin seats available for purchase) >= (number of comp upgrades available)

It sounds like you changed the origination of your trip which requires the entire ticket to be reissued and repriced based on the change. In order to do this, all segments must be booked in the inventory applicable to the fares being purchased or it won't price.

Thus, your upgraded segments had to be rebooked getting rid of the upgrade. Of course, the agent could have called the tariff desk and asked them to manually price it so that your upgrade space would have been retained. This would have required them to waive the booking class (although you held the right class when the ticket was first issued). Depending on policy, they may or may not have allowed this.