Hi - long story short, I have 2 bus seats YYZ-IST (stopover), IST-MALE, and return MALE-IST-MXP-YYZ (for my honeymoon :-) ).

I have to cancel this booking and immediately rebook (because I have another award I had to cancel, missed the 21 day to reinstate, and now have a huge mile credit that I now have to use for the MALE trip).

So I have to cancel my existing MALE, reinstate those miles, and use the credit to rebook. All without losing my existing seats. which I know may be impossible.

My existing MALE booking is 300,000 miles - my credit is 180,000. I know that when I cancel, they will put the seats back into inventory and there is no guarantee I will get them. How long does it take once the seats are cancelled for them to show up on the agent's computer again? Are there steps I can take to reduce the risk of losing the seats during this process?

I was thinking I could amend the existing MALE booking to make it the one way return, cancel the outbound and use 150,000 of the 180,000 to try to rebook the outbound so I only risk losing one way... any other suggestions? Or should I do the reverse (keep the outbound and risk losing the inbound)? Which route is likely to be the most popular and therefore likely to get snapped up?

Are there best times to call that are not that busy so I cancel them when there are less likely to be a lot of people looking? I have checked around the same time, there is nothing else. So it's this, or lose my honeymoon. :-(.

Appreciate some advice... thank you.