Thanks so much for the responses!

Called UA just now and the change from SJC to SFO would be $450 per passenger

The revenue ticket was part of the really good *A sale a couple of months back, where you could get US-Europe-US for about 1000€ in J (a P fare class). An amazing deal and I managed to use this ticket in two trips. First one in June for geting from US to Europe and now the second one to get back to US before heading down to South America.

I had to be flexible with the airports, so the ticket was BOS-VCE-SJC. Major hubs like JFK, SFO, ... didn't work. And back then (about 3-4 months ago) I actually had plans to spend a couple of days in the SJC/SFO area before heading out.

With new plans, I did plan to skip the IAH-SJC part of the ticket and get a AV LifeMiles IAH-PVR award but for some reason, there's no Saver availability on August 6th in either J or Y (despite 9+ seats in J).

Prices to buy IAH-PVR on August 6th are 410€ with UA and 320€ with US for IAH-PHX-PVR in Y, which is a lot. I see IAH-PHX on the 5th and PHX-PVR on the 6th for 180€ in Y but I'm guess then I would just be buying us an overnight in Phoenix...

I'll still follow your suggestion of first checking the bag only to IAH and ask one more time at the airport and see how it goes.

I guess we'll just have to make the most of that 12AM-9AM midnight migration from SJC to SFO... any suggestions on how to best spend those 9 hours? I know that the first Caltrain from SJ towards SF goes at about 5AM...