Mrs. and I used farelock last year for a different purpose - to guarantee us what we felt were the best seats in the house on a few flights.

We knew we were going to Beijing departing on a Friday sometime in August, but we wouldn't know when untll about two weeks before. We were flying in J and this was probably the only chance we would ever have to fly in the upper deck of the 744. We really wanted seats 14AB so starting at about 10 weeks before departure (8 weeks before we knew our departure date), we did the 7 day farelocks for all 4 ORD-PEK flights departing on Fridays during our expected departure time period, and we would select seats 14AB on all of these flights.

Irronically we were only charged 1 farelock charge for each flight even though there were two of us traveling. Oh, and the plan worked.