mattgoolsby

A couple days ago I put an international award ticket on hold. We can only do the 60K miles, so I needed to be creative with some things.

Outbound: ATL-AMS-ATH (arrive in ATH at 12:40am) Leaving 6/20/Arrive 6/22

Inbound: ATH-CDG-AMS-ATL (3 night stop in AMS)

All flights are on partner airlines.

I really do not like the idea of getting into Athens at that hour of the night because we will have two children with us. Not to mention that we would be heading to the northern part of the country the next morning to catch a ferry to one of the northern islands. Paying for a hotel room for what would amount to about 6 hours is hard for me to justify, especially since there are really only two expensive options around that airport. So I kept searching.

This morning I found an outbound route as follows:

ATL-BOS-CDG-AMS-ATH

Once again, all flights except for ATL-BOS are on partners.

Instead of getting into ATH at 12:40am on 6/22, we would get into ATH at 4:40pm on 6/21. Yes, we would need to fly more segments, but I could now get all the way to my final island destination on 6/21. So I placed just the outbound on hold.

Here is my issue. The inbound flights are showing as no longer available in the DL search engine. The website has already told me I need to call DL to ticket this. When I do so, are they able to pull my new outbound flights I put on hold this morning, and then pull the inbound flights from my other itiinerary, thus creating one new itinerary?

davisew

In my experience, they cannot combine (remember you've got 2 separate PNRs here - the ticketed one and the one on hold).

The agent will cancel the itinerary you have on hold, hope the "low" seats you have on hold go back into inventory, and then change your existing ticket to your desired routing.

The other option is to cancel the leg of the existing itinerary that you want to replace and issue the itinerary on hold, however this would result in 2 one-way itineraries that would cost you 2x the miles which kind of defeats the purpose.

mattgoolsby

At this point, I do not have anything ticketed. I have two itineraries on hold.

I did think about cancelling one of the itineraries, but I do not see an option to cancel what I have on hold. There use to be a button to do this, but that does not appear to be the case any longer.

acjflyer

If both routings are on hold, then a phone rep can combine them. I've had three or four award tickets on hold when I tried to book a complicated multi-city award and they combined them and could ticket it as one.

Good luck.