Does United penalize you for booking a backup award itinerary? I had a trip booked through UA's system on TK from EWR-IST-CGK for this coming November that got screwed up by TK schedule changes recently. I was able to rebook it into a EWR-WAW-IST-CGK itinerary which should work but is not ideal. It also left me with a bad feeling about TK's reliability.
Searching through UA's system today I just saw that award space on BR opened up for JFK-TPE-CGK on the day I want. That would work well for me but Taiwan comes with significant COVID risk since their border controls are much stricter. I should soon have enough UA points though to book an additional award itinerary without cancelling my current one. From UA's redeposit policy it appears I can cancel one of the two itineraries without any fee up to 30 days before departure.
This makes me wonder, will UA penalize for booking that I clearly don't intend to take? If I have two separate New York to Jakarta flights within 24 hours of each other it should be pretty obvious that I won't be using one of them.