As it goes, I'm taking my first flight with a new employer and I'm buying economy tickets through their Concur-linked TA, so I'm going to pay the difference to jump to domestic first. However, because I have to go through Concur and it's locked down to the point that I can't even see non-economy seats, I have to first buy the (usually W) fare they offer and then get it updated to whatever F-type fare is available.

I priced out fares in F and then bought the W ticket through Concur but I was caught off-guard to see the F ticket jump $100 in price. I went back and cancelled the W ticket and a few minutes later the F dropped back down to its previous rate. I've now gone in and bought farelock for the F fare since I had a few bucks left on a CC's airline fee reimbursement that expires this month, but now I'm wary that it won't help me since the Concur reservation will be a totally separate ticket.

So my question to FT is...are there any magic words I should use when talking with United to try and get the farelock-ed price when I want to buy up to F? Failing that, any other advice on how to go about this irritating chore? I've send an email to our corp TA but apparently their SLA for emails is 72 hours, so I'm trying to solve this on my own.

Probably nothing.

You've held a reaervation on UA.com, at that guaranteed price, and a have a separate reservation through your TA in just Y. they aren�t going to transfer the guaranteed fare to your other ticket, especially since you are upfaring. Not only that, you may have to look at COC, but they could perceive this as holding two reservations on the same flight, a violation of it. In fact, this may make your case worse, as if you�ve taken the last discount fare out of inventory for the farelock, it may not be available, even if you cancel the Farelock.

Id say just drop the farelock, and call UA to upfare. If you don�t like the price, then hang on and see if it comes back. You�re not going to win this game the way you are playing.

I'm guessing that what's happening here is that the flight only has one seat in W available. The price for F on domestic routes is normally tied to the Y inventory, to ensure a minimum price delta between Y and F. If you were to try it again, I bet you'd find that the cheapest coach fare had also gone up by $100.

I'm not sure of any magic words to make this work. However, if you're willing to forego PQD and extra redeemable miles on the fare difference, you may be able to get the same price differential via the "Upgrade Reservation" link on united.com.

FYI: UA will report the re-issuance back to Concur, so you might want to make sure your company is OK with you paying out of pocket to upgrade. (There are legitimate reasons they might not be, especially if you're going from corporate fares to public fares by doing so).

I don't know about your new employer, but having your first interaction with its travel system being one where you are attempting to game its policies seems to be not a wise one. Companies use Concur to enforce policies related to when lowest-priced economy is required and so on. While you may think what you are doing is perfectly acceptable, trying to get Concur to issue a W fare ticket when lower priced economy tickets are available would not be considered kosher. Further, many companies are very wary of having other entities (even yourself) subsidize the travel of their employees -- because of the potential for conflicts of interest or violations of employment law that require the company reimburse business expenses. My advice, fly the ticket that Concur wants to sell you.

I didn't realize how complicated it would be to work things out. I'm already missing the days of just buying on a personal card and getting reimbursed.

I finally got a hold of our corp TA and they couldn't explain why a coach ticket would impact the price of F fares. I did go ahead and book through them and buy up to F (I had already confirmed that nobody would get pissy about this in the travel department). It turns out that the coach ticket went up enough to make the difference between the F fare the same as before the jump.

It's because all offered discount F fares are based on a differential to available Y fares, to ensure that the cheapest available F fare is always more expensive than the cheapest available Y fare.