drewguy

Seems reasonable to call you to cancel some of them.

Seems entirely unreasonable not to give you your money back. In that scenario, I would have requested my money back or disputed the charges for the cancelled farelock.

PaulInTheSky

To me, the two scenarios are the same. It is the difference between 'I don't know when I am going to the known destination' vs 'I don't know where I am going on Monday morning, different places and customers'. I don't see these two are the problems because at times you would have to make a decision when and where you need to fly to the customers' site or the headquarters. That is ok.

However, the two different cases between 'Booking last-minute tickets(leaving wthin 24)' vs 'Booking tickets far within seven or 14 business days'. Suppose you book the tickets with some time in advance, you should not have a problem. However, this specific case is going to cause problem, duplicate reservation. For example, some people in AA reported that if you want to secure a systemwide upgrade clearing, you have a restricted fare and you make another reservation to hold up a F/J space on the same flight, you are gaming the upgrade system - Always try to leave one seat for you to upgrade, with a seat empty then you would have a shot at the upgrade. That is against the T&Cs of FFPs.

United757

UA can offer a fare hold for 24 hours or a refund within 24 hours of ticketing as mandated by the DOT (it's a little more complicated than this).

They choose to take your money up front and offer a refund, so I wouldn't worry about this.

kop84

I had outlined 3 scenarios.

Cxld Rebook for the same itinerary over multiple days still only holds 1 seat at a time.

The other scenarios you are holding multiple seats at the same time.

One person should be able to hold One seat a time, I don't think that's an unreasonable policy.

drewguy

Indeed, I wonder if they could take any punitive action under DOT's rules so long as the OP were doing this with paid tickets for which he requests a refund within 24 hours.

Obviously some of the other questions posed (FF tickets) may raise different issues.

drewguy

Unless the person is buying fully refundable tickets (or using miles) they can hold multiple seats for only 24 hours - DOT has implicitly decided that must be allowed, at least more than 7 days before travel.

aCavalierInCoach

I had no idea about this - very interesting in respect of juggling award flight changes. Any source?

Kacee

Hmm . . . not sure I agree with that conclusion.

All DOT says is you have to offer a 24 hour no-cost hold. If UA determines that a pax is abusing that rule by booking tix with no intent to fly, there's nothing that prohibits UA from terminating their MP membership and banning them from the airline.

PaulInTheSky

OK. I see there are three cases here. However, I must say I don't think that is the correct assumption that one should hold one seat at a time. You are assuming one person can go to the same airline for the outbound and the inbound.

There are three factors that make your case much more complicated to implement and enforced.

1. FFP recorded in the account: If a specific person books three different destinations on the same day without FFP, it requires more work to identify if that is coming from the same person. (e.g. contractor booking in Expedia/Priceline/CWT/Orbtiz). Think about how many seats you can get on the same day? To do the concrete check in bruce-force, you are going to take a lot of time to find out if one has the same ticket to multiple destinations on the same day from the same origin.

2. You can take different flights as a return. Suppose you take EWR-ORD. You take UA on the way out, and how about AA on the way back? How are we gonna determine if you are abusing the ticket systems by occupying different seats in different flights at the same time?

3. How to define 'at the same time'? There are so many people commuting ORD-EWR, ORD-DEN, ORD-IAH, DCA-IAH every single day. By following your logic(Mon, Tue, Wed, same O/D), Would they be taking multiple seats at the same time?

I believe that the airlines are trying to prevent multiple reservations when they know passengers cannot make them all at the same time(Duplicate reservations) as an attempt to secure their own upgrade. Other than that, it is very difficult to determine what the intention was to book multiple tickets on the same day or on consecutive days in the week.