Duplicate Bookings
 

Airlines have become quite good at catching duplicate bookings. Being terribly busy with meetings and whatnot, one's schedule can become more than unpredictable. The solution, until recently, was duplicate booking--all in luxurious, changable, refundable, Y class. The Airlines' computer systems are simply becoming too clever. Can anyone suggest how one might "beat the system"?

1) Don't put your FF # in the records. That is one of the primary mechanisms the airlines use for duplicate bookings.

2) Book the two reservations through different booking engines.

3) Modify your name slightly. Use a middle initial on one booking and not in another. Use a suffix such as Jr, PhD, JD etc on one and not the other.

There are many cases were a parent and child with the same name are both flying together. Putting in these small differnces should help, as the airlines will not want to cancel and father and son, e.g.

Just put an award ticket on hold for my GF. Only problem was that she already had an award ticket on hold for slightly different but overlapping dates to the same destination, and we needed a bit of time to figure out which one we wanted to use. So she got one as firstname/lastname, and I got the other one as firstinitial/lastname. No problem making both bookings, and no problem getting on the plane no matter which one she ends up using.

Since these were award tickets, there was no need for her FF number, but if they had been paid tickets it's easy enough to add it at check-in. Worst case, you request missing mileage credit later.

My current travel agent refuses to make such bookings. Do you all know of a good travel agent, who is on the GSA schedule, and will also make such tricky bookings?