Originally Posted by ScruttonStreet

I seem also to recall that cancelling a booking (as you need to do in this case) and then making a new booking (assuming it can't be done online) requires conversations with two different people and you need to hang up from one and then call the other to make it happen.

Hence you have a nervous wait between cancelling - and the availability of the outbound reappearing in the inventory - and being able to speak to someone else to snap it back up.