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?

I'm trying to minimize my total cost of airfare and my goal is to sit in business class.

Symmetre

I expect you're going to have difficulty making two bookings on the same flight.

kubees

That's a good point. So technically I could leave this all until T-24 hours of the flight, then refund full J, try to buy flex economy + LMU, and if the LMU fails, cancel and rebook full J?

=

Edited: Now that I think of it, another option is to do this with air canada upgrade bids. Buy flex Y, put in a bid upgrade, and 48 hours or so out see if it's been accepted. If not, buy full J...

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.

Far Siren

Notwithstanding Symmetre 's excellent point on the challenges of making duplicate bookings, the annals of FT are full of frequent flyers who tried to dupe the system with these kinds of shenanigans and in the end had their accounts shut down, miles confiscated, etc. It just won't end well for you.

kubees

All of that said, I don't think there's anything wrong with:

"Now that I think of it, another option is to do this with air canada upgrade bids. Buy flex Y, put in a bid upgrade, and 48 hours or so out see if it's been accepted. If not, buy full J..." Win win for AC?

Adam Smith

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.

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 @kubees'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, @kubees, 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.

canadiancow

Holding J seats to get a cheap/free upgrade is probably the worst possible thing you can do from RM's perspective.

If they'll take away your status for using the MLL before cancelling your flight, they could certainly do it for this. Or send you an invoice for the fare difference (I've seen AC send much more stupid invoices after the fact), followed by sending you to collections (I've also seen that for much more stupid reasons).

Pentryn

Some recent data points on short haul LMU's on some CR9 flights:

YQR-YVR AC8189
J8 R6 at T-24
LMU offered $235.20 CAD

SAN-YVR AC8763
J6 R5 at T-24
LMU offered for $261.57 USD ($350 CAD exactly)

YVR-YQR AC8192
J6 R4 at T-24, more space seemed to open up before the flight, seemingly to 9
LMU offered for $186.64 USD ($250 CAD exactly)

Ended up not accepting any of the 3 offers, seemed too high for CR9 business class and the short length of the flights.

canadiancow

CUN-YYZ tonight for two.

PY was 17,200 points + 63.30 CAD per person when I booked 3 days ago.

LMU is 1899 MXN.

AC 925 CUN-YYZ 22:30 - 02:20+1 333 J9 C9 D9 Z9 P9 R9 O9 E9 A9 N9 Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 Q9 V9 W9 S9 T9 L9 K0 G0

I doubt the cousin+1 are going to pay it, and since I already bought the ticket for them, I'm not super interested in throwing another 100 USD at each person. But... that's cheap.

Adam Smith

You haven't taught her very well.

yulscs

I first read this as 1899 Milan Malpensas, and enjoyed a few seconds transition from confusion to feeling dumb.

canadiancow

Nah, I was wrong. I wrote MXP when it should have been MXN.

pilotboy1985YYC

Lmu
$330USD for YUL - YHZ on Air Canada Rouge? 😂 😆

canadiancow

It's a little above my "shut up and do it" price, but it seems reasonable...