As it goes, I'm taking my first flight with a new employer and I'm buying economy tickets through their Concur-linked TA, so I'm going to pay the difference to jump to domestic first. However, because I have to go through Concur and it's locked down to the point that I can't even see non-economy seats, I have to first buy the (usually W) fare they offer and then get it updated to whatever F-type fare is available.

I priced out fares in F and then bought the W ticket through Concur but I was caught off-guard to see the F ticket jump $100 in price. I went back and cancelled the W ticket and a few minutes later the F dropped back down to its previous rate. I've now gone in and bought farelock for the F fare since I had a few bucks left on a CC's airline fee reimbursement that expires this month, but now I'm wary that it won't help me since the Concur reservation will be a totally separate ticket.

So my question to FT is...are there any magic words I should use when talking with United to try and get the farelock-ed price when I want to buy up to F? Failing that, any other advice on how to go about this irritating chore? I've send an email to our corp TA but apparently their SLA for emails is 72 hours, so I'm trying to solve this on my own.