Held Flight - Price Drop
 

I put a flight on hold last night. The price has now dropped. To take advantage of the price drop, should AA automatically give it to me when I go to purchase my held flight? Or do I need to cancel my hold and make a separate purchase?

What happens when you click through to the purchase page for your held flight? If it offers you the lower price, you're good. Otherwise, cancel the hold and purchase* (or create a new hold).

* adding: if you cancel and purchase, probably best to have two tabs open, get all the way to the payment page in one tab, and then cancel the hold in the other tab immediately before buying. Otherwise you run a small risk of the fare going up between when you cancel the hold and try to book the new ticket.

It looks like they won't automatically give me the new fare, so I'll try the cancel/purchase route.

I'm sure someone else can explain this better, but the 'hold' is for a specific fare basis. If the price of that fare basis decreases during the hold, you will automatically be charged the lower price. If the price of a different fare basis becomes available that is lower than your held price, you will not receive that lower fare basis/price.

Therefore it is still advisable to recheck fares on held tickets and cancel/repurchase.

Don't do this in the same browser. Open and cancel the hold itinerary in Internet explorer and book the new reservation in chrome, firefox etc.

I got burned with this last year. Thought I had cancelled my hold reservation by clicking cancel on one tab. Went to the other tab and booked the new reservation. Went back to the old cancellation tab and saw that it took me to a new page and had to confirm cancellation again. Hit cancel. An hour later the ticket confirmation for the new rez was emailed to me. Noticed a week later that the new reservation was showing cancelled. Called in and they said I cancelled it and would need to rebook at the significantly more expensive price. Explaining my plight fell on deaf ears.

Just be careful when you do this.

Go Gators

I had this happen. I called in and they gave me the lower price without any argument. It did not appear that there was any way to do it online without canceling the hold then buying the ticket after a new search.

This makes a lot of sense.

You explained it correctly! ^

Even better would be to use two browsers (Firefox vs Chrome, for instance).

Some airline and travel sites will only handle one search/purchase at a time, and strange things end up happening. Southwest, for instance, is particularly bad.

This. The website cookies will get very confused if doing this in one browser and may have very weird results. Use two different browsers (not just browser windows).

There is no reason at all to have the unticketed PNR on hold open. Once you have verified that the hold is still there and not loused up, close out of the browser entirely.

Then go back and book the new ticket in the new fare bucket and after you have the new e-ticket number, go back and release the hold.

It won't let you do this assuming it's the same passenger on the same flights.

you can call in to have a phone agent reprice the itin and keep same record locator