Continental "Plan B" allows you to pay the miles for businessfirst and get a mileage refund if you don't get a seat in businessfirst. Even if you do get a seat in First Class for the non-BF portion but do not get the BR seat you will get the mileage refund.
From this Israel trip report:
http://www.dansdeals.com/archives/5335It works like this: If there is a saverpass coach award seat you can call up the international reward desk and ask for a BusinessFirst ticket but be seated in coach and placed on a waitlist for a BusinessFirst seat. For EWR-TLV your account will be debited 57,500 miles for each way.
You will either clear the waitlist into BusinessFirst no later than 24 hours before the flight or the waitlist will expire.
If at 24 hours before the flight you still don’t have a BusinessFirst seat then at the airport you have to find an International Concierge or other knowlegdable looking agent and tell them that you are a displaced BusinessFirst customer.
If they have no idea what you are talking about tell them to look up “gg onestandby” and review lines 85-89 which spell out the details of this reward. (This is reminiscent of “gg checkpoint line 53″ which you have to reference to show agents how to give you a security pass for you and your guests to access post-security Presidents Club’s if you aren’t flying.)
If they need to verify that you have a BusinessFirst reward have them call up the reward desk.
Still not able to get a seat in BusinessFirst? Just call up the reward desk after the flight and they’ll give you a refund of the difference between the standard coach award and the standard BusinessFirst award.