ASUDan130

Hi all I am semi unsure about buying a ticket but want to lock down the price. Whats to stop someone from each day holding a reservation every single day before booking it? Does anyone do this?

vasantn

Yes, many people. Of course, you may not be able to renew the hold at the same price.

imagineertobe

Right, for example if you have a held itinerary at $700 and as you try to put the same itinerary on hold again to extend by 24 hours you see that the price is now $1000. Then you've got to decide if you should give up holding and wait for another sale to come around, or if the $700 hold you have now is good enough, at which point AA makes the sale. So it's not all to AA's detriment.

gemac

In addition, renewing the hold every day is a big PITA. As others have noted, if the price changes, it changes, so if it is there for you it would have been there for you if you had not been holding. The only benefit to you from doing this is you can buy the one you held yesterday if the price goes up, and there is some possibility that the price could go down and you could catch the lower price.

My (very limited) experience has been that I search based on price & schedule for my dates, find the flights I want, and carry it through to the point where I see the hold button. At that point, I have to open another window and cancel yesterday's hold, then go back to my original window and hold the flights today. If I try to hold before cancelling yesterday's hold, I get an error message that I am already on those flights.

videomaker

That's true.

I've extended some holds for a few days trying to finalize plans or seeing if prices would go down. But for anything longer, it is a pain--especially if you forget one day and that's when the price went up.

JY1024

+1 This is the same procedure I use also. Every once in a while when I get tired of extending the hold myself, I'll call the EXP desk and have the AAgent check to see if the fare is still valid. If so, I'll ask them to place the fare hold for me. (I'm not sure if they have the ability to simply "extend" a fare hold from their side or whether they're essentially doing what we're doing - check current fare, cancel old hold, put itin on hold again.)

noam

I've been successful with this as well.

aktchi

It is perfectly legal to cancel an expiring reservation (after checking that the fare is still available), and starting another one for the next 24 hours. The only thing stopping you is that you may get tired of the process. I have done this a few times.

Of course, it makes sense to take all this trouble day after day only if there is room for a meaningful drop. I would hold a $1500 fare for a few days to see if it comes down to $1200-$1300. OTOH, if I am holding a $79 fare, just how much lower can it go? It's not like AA will offer it for $9 one of these days. So keep things in perspective.

FlyMeToTheLooneyBin

Well, it could be meaningful if you haven't made up your mind yet, and you don't want it to go up. There's always room to go up.

gemac

Sure, but if you haven't made up your mind yet as to whether to go, the fare going up shouldn't make it up for you. If you are willing to go at yesterday's price, book it yesterday. If you aren't willing to go at that price, the fact that prices are going up today shouldn't change your willingness to go.

swag

I'll roll my holds not when I'm unsure whether I'll take the trip, but when I'm not quite sure about my preferred departure time (or day).

FlyMeToTheLooneyBin

Yeah. Sorry. I was unclear. I meant when you haven't made up your mind on the specifics of your trip, such as time or date. Sure, you don't randomly put things on hold and roll them every day to exercise your power over AA's fare changes. But sometimes, you put something on hold not knowing if 8am is a good time. Then the next day, the fare goes up and you decide, "heck, 8am will have to do." All I'm saying is, holds are not just to protect just in case fares go down, so they also apply to low-fare holds.

arollins

Once I'm sure of my travel plans I will put the reservation on hold and repeat the same procedure for a couple of days at most and buy the ticket. In all the times I've done this, I've never had the new fare being LOWER than the hold fare, typically its the same or higher. The few times it was lower, it was a different booking code. I've never had the opportunity of finding a lower publised fare on same booking code.

The hold and check procedure is PITA as others mentioned, but it does work.

aktchi

One small trick is to do this a little after midnight. Then the hold lasts for almost 2 days. (Later Edit: As the following discussion shows, this is often the case but not always. Fare rules may dictate otherwise. Among various rules, the most restrictive will count.)

vasantn

IME it has to be quite a bit past midnight for this to work.