Originally Posted by
emcampbe
Why should it be used as a credit toward the ticket cost? Its an extra service - UA is giving you the opportunity to hold a ticket (for longer than you could have when free hold was available) and guarantee the ticket cost at current levels, even when the prices could rise for any one of a multitude of reasons (fare pulled from market, fare increase, last ticket at that price gets bought by someone else, etc).
If they're not going to make any money while providing the service for you, why should they not just be willing to sell the ticket to someone else at the lower fare, who is willing to buy it right away?
This is extremely common in other industries. Have you visited Disney lately? Buy, say, a 1-day park pass, and you can upgrade the 1-day pass into a 3-day pass by going to any ticket counter, so long as you do it before the 1-day pass expires. The amount you pay to upgrade the pass is not the price of a 2-day pass, but the difference between a 3-day pass and what you paid for the 1-day pass. And then you can upgrade that 3-day pass to an Annual Pass, so long as you do it before the 3-day pass expires (still good for entering the parks), by going to any ticket counter. The price you pay to upgrade is not the total cost of an Annual Pass, but the difference in cost between an Annual Pass and what you've already paid in total for the 3-day pass.
Disney wants you to be an Annual Passholder. If not that, they want you buying as many days as possible and spending as much time in the Parks as possible. As such, they're not going to penalize you for buying a pass with fewer days on it at first and then wanting to give them more money later on for a pass that's valid longer.
Only in the airline industry do we have insane policies that result in having to get change fees waived for buying up to higher fares or higher cabins:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...-gg-buyup.html
Doesn't UA want to earn your business? They could simply allow you to apply the amount of the FareLock to the itinerary so long as you actually purchase the same itinerary at the FareLocked price. This would be reasonable; the risk you would be taking is that if the price actually goes down, you wouldn't book the FareLocked itinerary, but another one instead, and would lose the money you put into the FareLock. Kind of like buying a call option on a stock with the strike price set to the current market price before the price goes down. You're out the amount you paid for the options.