Originally Posted by
kubees
Situation: Say I can only buy a full fare J ticket (TB) for a flight I need to take in T+3 days. As a result, that flight is $$$. Because full J is refundable without fees, my intent is to buy a full J ticket to 'hold' onto the seat.
Question: If I buy a flex economy ticket at T-24 hours to that flight I'm holding above, can I just 1) See if a LMU is available, and 2) If available, put in my LMU, and if it clears, I cancel my full J ticket and save a few $ while sitting in business class or 3) If LMU not available, cancel my flex economy ticket as it's booked within 24 hours?
LMUs don't clear, they're either available at check-in or not. This strategy is certainly feasible, although keep in mind that tying up a J seat may push up the price of the LMU by reducing J inventory.
Originally Posted by
Bohemian1
Just to clarify, while you certainly
could do this, the "difficulty" in making two bookings is that the dupe detector
will flag this and
may cancel one of your bookings.
We know that the dupe detector exists, I just don't think there has been enough data points shared on FT to determine exactly how it behaves. So, like
Symmetre says, you're taking a risk.
Without wanting to sidetrack this in to a conversation that might better be held in the
duplicate bookings thread, I would say it
may or
is likely to flag the bookings, but it's not guaranteed that it will. And I don't know how gathering more data points would help us figure out how it works. It's absolutely baffling that it would flag some of the stuff I booked when I was UFPing that were both legal according to the tariff and composed entirely of legal connections, yet also never flagged some bookings, including at least one time when I had
three conflicting bookings (ones that truly conflicted because they all departed YYC at the same time).
What I will say in the context of [MENTION=10093678]kubees[/MENTION]'s question is that the dupe detector always provides some time period within which to clear the duplicates. That time period seems to be correlated to the time between detection and the flight, but even at T-24, I don't think it's going to cancel them in 5 minutes, so the strategy of booking an economy ticket at T-24 and immediately checking in to see whether LMU is available should not be impacted by the dupe detector. I wouldn't let the two bookings hang out for hours - I would immediately cancel whichever one I didn't want - but provided this is worked through promptly, auto-cancel shouldn't be a problem.
All that being said, [MENTION=10093678]kubees[/MENTION], I would suggest that if AC ever figured out what you were doing, they would not be too pleased. I don't know that they'd have any legal recourse, but could they come after your status or Aeroplan account or something? Maybe. This might be kind of like hidden-city ticketing in that it's pretty much against the rules, but are they likely to catch you, and, if they do, do anything about it if you only do it once in a while? So it's up to you how much risk you want to assume.