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Losing an award seat on United sucks… How to properly renew an award hold

A few days ago, I held an award ticket to Europe on United using the PayPal trick. Award holds that involve any partner airlines are valid till midnight the next day.

The next day, I wanted to hold the award again because I was still uncertain about my plans.  This would give me another day to think about things.  In theory, you could do this again and again everyday as long as award seats are still available.

So, I searched for award seats and saw that they were still available.  Naturally, I cancelled my existing hold, so that I could create a new hold.

Then, a crazy thing happened!   As I tried to create a new hold, the award space that I had just seen 5 minutes ago was no longer showing.  I am really unsure of why this happened, but it did. Can inventory change that quickly?  You would figure that if you cancel an award, that inventory would go back into play and be bookable again.  I tried again and again to no avail.  I was quite upset as in my mind, I had just lost (cancelled) 2 award seats.  If I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold the award again because the seats would disappear, I might have been tempted to just ticket the award.

Out of luck and award seats, I wondered if I could have done anything different to prevent this scenario from happening.  Could I have created a 2nd award hold for the same flights and itinerary BEFORE canceling the 1st?   If that was possible, there would never be an instance where I was without award seats.  In my above example, it was in “this instance” where award inventory disappeared and I had already lost my award.

So, I tried it.  I tried to hold the same itinerary twice.  I searched for award space, found the space, held the award, and repeated the process for the same passenger.

And I was successful!  Although you can’t see the exact details, what you are seeing below are two different award holds (different confirmation numbers) for the same exact flight on the same day.  Yes, I am holding 2 seats under my name on the same flight.

united hold

What does this prove?

The moral of the story here is that United will let you hold more than one seat in your name for the same flight.  I didn’t think that this would be possible.

This is key in that you can extend your award hold by creating a second award hold for your flights before canceling your existing one.  The intuitive thing to do is to cancel your existing award hold and then create a new one.  However, when you do that, you take the risk of losing award seats altogether.  Although that risk is probably small, it happened to me.

This is of course valid only if award seats are available to create a second hold.Have you ever let go of award space and then seen the inventory disappear?

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