Bumping thread to report spectacular "success" that was worst ride ever
Alright. Less than one-half of the points awarded for one credit pull (BA card) got turned into economy plus seats that led to an "involuntary" upgrade to business (club world) for LHR-IAD. That's a net plus of about $12,000 for the two seats.
There's a long version and a short version of what came next. This is the short.
Never having aspired to club world, I had not realized that 2 out of the 8 pods per row in business class on this particular BA plane are a double that basically turn into a very narrow, though 6 foot long, bed private from the adjoining pods and the aisle. One of our seats was in the double pod shared by an English man in his 60s who tensed when I sat down. (Gave my 15-yo daughter the adjoining single aisle pod.) Turns out that his wife was in the aisle pod on the other side of the double and I'm about to spend the night so to speak with her husband. While I am hardly a glamour puss I had managed to be wearing a rather dramatic long skirt and fresh linen blouse with my hair twisted up into a bandana.
For our particular double pod and adjoining singles what would have worked well for my daughter and I and our new "best friends" would for me and the husband to continue to share the double over dinner chatting with our loved ones through the windows then at bedtime for me to switch with the wife away from my daughter giving them "the bed."
This didn't happen. The wife promptly set about trying to find a new place to get me *out* of that pod. This - along with other switches being made by other passengers - led to a game rather like musical chairs. A rather impatient man I'd never seen showed up for my daughter's seat *now.* Sometimes flight attendants were involved, sometimes not. As a up-gradee I kept agreeing to whatever a passenger wanted. This approach alas did not always work well for what one passenger wanted could conflict with another.
My daughter and I ended up back together when a late-arriving passenger gave his seat to my DD (who sitting there with her stuffed animal sucking on a lollipop looked younger than her age). He seemed to be the only "white knight." The moves involved one passenger (English wife) making faces at the purser behind his back thru her pod window then slamming down the privacy screen - outright fibbing (alas again the English wife who *was* determined). Others were unnecessarily stubborn or sowed confusion by misspeaking.
Other than the fact my daughter got her long-expressed wish to ride in a pod, I'd have far rather kept our original economy plus seats back in the proverbial cattle car. Would have been more than happy with the extra legroom in plus.
