I don’t think it’s surprising. I think higher-status frequent flyers tend to be very aware of the their benefits (and the intricacies of utilizing them).

I’ve run into this in the past as well and I could never understand how some agents who deal with hundreds of calls/people per day for years can be so uninformed when dealing with basic requests that have been allowed for years.

A few months back I ran into an issue where one of my award reservations didn’t show as CPU eligible even though I have a UA CC. I had to HUCA 3 separate times because each of the first 2 agents were adamant that award tickets were not eligible for CPU’s under any circumstances.

Even after explaining that it is a stated benefit and that I am always added to the list the second agent basically accused me of either lying or extremely confused and put a bunch of nasty notes in my PNR which eventually backfired when agent #3 was well aware of the policy and said she would escalate the situation for re-training of the previous agent

Just because it is international doesn’t mean it isn’t eligible for CPU’s. There are many non-Polaris international flights to Central America and the Caribbean that are most definitely eligible for CPU’s, so I suspect this might be where some of the confusion came in.

Surprisingly, there are more than a few ticket/phone/gate agents out there who are not even aware of this and insist that anything international doesn’t qualify.

Re:agent knowledge, I’d bet less than 2% of calls deal with such detailed / specific issues. I would bet most calls are very very basic.