Award Ticket - Hold

 
Old Apr 20, 2010, 9:05 am
  #1  
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Award Ticket - Hold

I know that award reservations can only be put on hold for five days and
it is difficult to get an extension.

If I have a two segment saver reservation, on the fifth day can I make a change to second segment and restart the five day hold--effectively resulting in a ten day hold. I do not want the first segment to go back in the bucket because of availability issues.

Many thanks.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 9:08 am
  #2  
 
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From my experience this won't work. The original expiry date will still apply. You can always try. Good luck.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 12:06 pm
  #3  
 
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My experience has been pretty good in calling AA and requesting a hold extension. I've never been denied this request.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 12:09 pm
  #4  
brp
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Originally Posted by ldpeters
My experience has been pretty good in calling AA and requesting a hold extension. I've never been denied this request.
If the award availability is still there they can, basically, reissue it and the hold gets extended. In this case, one can do it online as well- by first holding it again (without AAdvantage number), then canceling the older one and adding AAdvantage number to the new hold. Doing things in this order assures that the inventory doesn't disappear after canceling.

Cheers.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 12:11 pm
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I have had good luck with extensions. The point is that one cannot get an extension unless the inventory shown in the original hold is still available. If not you have the choice between buying the held ticket and rebooking from scratch.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 12:24 pm
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Additional inventory would need to be available beyond the seats currently being held by your reservation. When you cancel a reservation, those seats you've released will not necessarily go back into the same booking class.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 1:34 pm
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Originally Posted by AndyAA
When you cancel a reservation, those seats you've released will not necessarily go back into the same booking class.
EXACTLY. Extending the hold is not a return and reissue. You can often extend the hold when no other award availability is available, and in instances where the partner carrier might not release additional award seats. I have learned this the hard way: I had a JFK-SFO-HKG hold and wanted to change it to SEA-SFO-HKG. They were able to extend the hold on the JFK reservation but then were unable to get the SFO-HKG segment back once I cancelled it (during the same phone call); the inventory never reappeared.

Last edited by ldpeters; Apr 21, 2010 at 5:26 pm
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 4:11 pm
  #8  
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Originally Posted by ldpeters
EXACTLY. Extending the hold is not a return and reissue.
Yup. This is what AndyAA (and I) said above. It's actually a reissue (based on additional inventory being available) and then a return of the existing reservation.

Originally Posted by ldpeters
You can often extend the hold when no other award availability is available, and in instances where the partner carrier might not release additional award seats.
This statement contradicts the post you quoted. That post said that additional inventory had to be available (beyond what is currently held) in order to effect the hold. Your statement seems to say that this additional capacity need not be available to extend the hold. While this may happen on occasion, this is generally not a true statement.

Cheers.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 8:43 pm
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Originally Posted by brp
If the award availability is still there they can, basically, reissue it and the hold gets extended. In this case, one can do it online as well- by first holding it again (without AAdvantage number), then canceling the older one and adding AAdvantage number to the new hold. Doing things in this order assures that the inventory doesn't disappear after canceling.

Cheers.
How do you hold an award ticket without entering an AAdvantage number? I know this strategy works for paid tickets, but I didn't think you could hold an award ticket without linking it to an AAdvantage account (which would ultimately pay for it).
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 8:53 pm
  #10  
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Originally Posted by beerup
How do you hold an award ticket without entering an AAdvantage number? I know this strategy works for paid tickets, but I didn't think you could hold an award ticket without linking it to an AAdvantage account (which would ultimately pay for it).
Hmmm...this is a paid ticket strategy. Perhaps it's not possible to do this online for awards for the reason you mention. Maybe only via phone...

Cheers.
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Old Apr 20, 2010, 11:17 pm
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Originally Posted by brp
Hmmm...this is a paid ticket strategy. Perhaps it's not possible to do this online for awards for the reason you mention. Maybe only via phone...

Cheers.
Of course, if additional inventory is available when an award hold is expiring, one can find the same itinerary online, then in another browser window, log in and cancel the held itinerary and finally go back to the origin window and hold the new itinerary. This means that there are just a few seconds where the inventory can disappear even if the original inventory doesn't go back into an award bucket.
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Old Apr 21, 2010, 5:25 pm
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Originally Posted by brp
This statement contradicts the post you quoted.
Sorry, I quoted more of that post than I intended. I have fixed it in my post.

Originally Posted by brp
Your statement seems to say that this additional capacity need not be available to extend the hold. While this may happen on occasion, this is generally not a true statement.
I'm not sure what's generally true or not. This has not been my experience very, very recently. For nearly three weeks, in February and March, I extended the hold on one F Saver AAwards, JFK-EZE. This was the last Saver awards on the flight (I know this because the real reason for my call for three weeks was to try to add another passenger, and there was never availability for the second passenger). In the last week I was literally calling a different agent every day, and never encountered a problem (though they always had to run it through the system).

My (quite frequent) conversations with the agents literally went something like this: "Is there another F award seat available? No? Shucks. Can you extend my hold another day? Sure? Great."

I'm not sure anymore what the standard is for "generally true" on FT, but this experience seems to indicate that it is far from an exception.
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Old Apr 26, 2010, 1:26 pm
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Clarification from EXP Desk

I wanted to illuminate a bit more on this subject, as last night I had a (fairly lengthy) conversation with a very helpful AAgent at the EXP desk about it (we were trying to find F availability SEA-HKG, and debated the merits of a hold as I wait for the miles to come through from a Diner's transfer).

The bottom line, in her experience, has been this:
  • AA can frequently (though not always) extend the hold on AA metal even where there are no additional award seats available. As she described it, on its own metal AA can basically release the hold and immediately redeposit the seats into inventory so that they can be reclaimed. Again, according to the AAgent, this is processed as an extension of the hold, and will work even when no additional seats are available -- because the seat that is on hold would just be re-released anyway, and thus would create an available seat. The only times you can't extend a hold on AA metal are circumstances where AA would not immediately re-release the seat into inventory. In the experience of the AAgent with whom I spoke, this rarely happens. Obviously, YMMV.
  • The above logic does not follow for partners (particularly Cathay), who may or may not redeposit the seats into inventory, and rarely do so immediately.

I hope that sheds some additional light on the issue, and helps people trying to figure this out. I think it's neat, because its consistent with pretty much everybody's observations so far. The EXP Desk strikes again!
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Old Apr 26, 2010, 3:50 pm
  #14  
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IDPETERS...thank you that is exactly the kind of information I was looking for..thanks again.
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Old Apr 26, 2010, 3:56 pm
  #15  
 
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So I'm booking a 75K biz award to OGG, and the only leg that hasn't been released is the final LAX-IAD leg. EXP desk actually booked the first 3 legs, and was waiting to hear back from Revenue Mgmt. Today is the official expiration date of the Hold. Since the EXP desk put this on hold, should I call to check/try to renew?
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