A couple of days ago I set up an itinerary, but put it on the "next day midnite" holding pattern, complete with its own PNR. Next morning, after confirming a meeting time, I went back to .bomb to check flight times & found an earlier outbound with the same return that actually cost approx $200 less per pax for the RT. So I booked it, getting a totally different PNR. Couldn't find a way to cancel the original held itinerary on line, so I called the 1p desk & got it taken care of. The rep said something about a change fee, but since the original one was on hold, that didn't apply. So here's the question: assume you have a held reservation, but want/need to make changes to it; can this be done on the same PNR at no cost? Especially, in a sense, involving a refare. Or would a change fee apply? [somehow the analogy of regaining virginity comes to mind]

Not sure I understand the question. A reservation on hold will just disappear, if you don't pay for the ticket, or you can cancel it yourself on line. If you wanted to make a change, why wouldn't you just start a new reservation?

I made a dummy "held" booking and then went back to it. If you look at it in your itineraries, choose "view/modify" instead of the purchase option, and it allows you to change it. There is no change fee for this; you can do what you want as you haven't purchased the ticket yet.

I assume the OP is asking about a held reservation that has gone up in price and he wanted to make changes but keep the lower price. IME that is not possible if you call reservations but you may luck out with web support

I have had 2 expierences with this in the last few months:

First I booked and held a ticket 14 days before travel (14 day adv), I confirmed the meeting the next day for later, so I tried to change online.... it wanted to refare (as I was now inside 14 days)by about 400.00. So I called and pled my case to an agent, who changed to the later flight (that was originally price the same as the early flight).

Second happend a few days ago (the SLC/CVG/ATL war) I held with the wrong return days (3 months later..oops), this agent wouldn't budge.

I *think* I understand it, although there are several permutations/scenarios that come to mind. Given a *held* (unpurchased reservation), one can go on line & cancel it; or change flights although presumably this might result in an up or down change to the fare itself, but with no $150 change fee involved; or just let it languish & eventually expire, but at the same time setting up a similar, but different itinerary. OR, you've booked & purchased an itinerary, but according to another thread I saw today, this could be canceled within 24 hours w/ no penalty, e.g., full refund (seems too good to be true); BUT, if you make a change to that purchased itinerary, the $150 applies? [my head is beginning to hurt]

You've got it right. I don't know why you would want to modify the already held reservation when it would be easier to just book the lower fare once you've found it. I've never had to cancel within 24 hours before, but it is supposedly stated somewhere on the website.

You won't be able to place a second reservation on hold without canceling the first hold if any of the segments (date and flight number) are identical. When this happens to me, I've always taken the second reservation up to the hold screen, making sure the price hasn't increased. Then, in a second window, canceled the first on hold reservation and then jumped back to the second window to put the second reservation on hold.

I need to cancel an itinerary that I have held, but for the life of me, I can't find the place to do this on united.bomb. From BL1KITW's experience, it sounds like it should be simple, but I don't see any way to do it online.

I see buttons and links for purchasing and viewing/changing the res, but when I view it, it only lets me change individual segments, not cancel the entire thing.

It's not the end of the world (it will auto-cancel eventually), but if I ever need to cancel a held reservation immediately to rebook myself on an itinerary that includes some of the same flights, I'd like to know how to do it!

Any tips?

Bring up the View/Purchase (or maybe it's Change/Purchase) on the held itinerary. Then there will be a "Delete" button at the bottom.

Due to .bomb horrible design, programming, and QA, nothing will seem to have happened. That's because the morons programmed the confirmation "do you really want to delete this" messagebox to appear at the top of the reservation - which you have had to scroll down past to get to the delete button - so it's on a part of the page you can't see until you scroll back up. But it's there.

I've called and asked for changes to a held reservation many times (and then continued to ticket online).
The changes I've requested include anything united.com doesn't do
(1) Adding a non-UA segment
(2) Switching from UA codeshare on LH metal to LH flight number
(3) Switching fare class from W to V so that SWUs can be used (LH metal)
These are the requests I can think of offhand.

That is not true at all, IME. Just now I held a 2nd reservation that was EXACTLY IDENTICAL to one I held yesterday (and haven't canceled yet).

Thanks for your instruction; that did the trick! ^

What might have fooled me is that I thought the Delete button applied to the currently selected segment, not to the entire itinerary. Even if I had tried the Delete button, I might not have seen the confirmation prompt, which was right where you said it was.

Like BL1KITW I have also seen the message that will not let you put two identical flights on hold, it appears with the last redesign that this FEATURE was disabled. Nice to know that we can go ahead and make duplicate holds now.

BTW I just tested it and can confirm you can hold two identical reservations.

This could be handy if you need to force a ticket purchase into a higher fare class for a certain promotion.

To give the OP a more generic answer: technically "held" reservations are simply non-ticketed PNRs. This means that they can be altered in any possible way, and of course without a fee.

However, united.com won't let you do that -- the "held" reservatrions from .bomb are simply non-ticketed PNRs that auto expire. The only actions you can take on them through the web site are delete or purchase.

Many TAs on the other hand can create non-ticketed PNRs that don't expire, and can change them anytime. Most likely a UA res agent can also change a held PNR.

Customers don't really need to understand these details though... since held reservations auto-expire you don't have to worry about them and if you want to make changes you can just create a new booking.

How would you do that? By attempting to deplete a given bucket?