BID UPGRADE

Elizabeth Webley thought she had found a deal. She bid $500 for an upgrade on a Swiss International Air Lines flight from Zurich to San Francisco, and the airline accepted. Then her plans changed, she rebooked, and she assumed her upgrade would either move to the new flight or come back to her card. It did neither. Swiss told her the bid was gone and that she would have to pay for a new upgrade, calling the original nonrefundable because she had changed the booking voluntarily. There is a name for this: the ghost upgrade, a product you pay for that vanishes the moment you touch your reservation. But Webley had something most travelers do not. She had taken a screenshot of the terms she agreed to at the moment of purchase, and those terms said plainly that if she changed her flight she was entitled to a full refund of the bid amount, as long as her fare allowed rebooking. The airline’s agents kept quoting a different rule, the one about voluntary cancellations, and pointing her to the FAQ. So the standoff came down to a single question with real money riding on it: when the contract you agreed to says one thing and the airline’s FAQ says another, which one is supposed to win?