Luckily I haven't had an special exceptions occur when travelling. I do agree that talking to a human is vastly better normally as they can actually help you or try to understand what is wrong.
I try to stick with the larger airlines to avoid problems. This hasn't always worked out because my friend unfortunately was booked on a Canada 3000 flight just when it went bankrupt and shutdown. They managed to get him onto another carrier's flight though a couple of days later. His girlfriend was unimpressed to say the least!

I ordered a laptop through the online site at Dell. It was stuck in the processing stage for about 2 weeks and during that time, the price of the laptop was reduced. I phoned up asking to see if there was any way of getting a discount (well, you never know and the guy said that because I was an internet order I couldn't. But if I had called up on the phone in the first place then he could have done it then and there. All of the orders for the entire European internet site are handled by two people apparently.

- Trevor