MileValue is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as CreditCards.com. This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. This site does not include all financial companies or all available financial offers. Terms apply to American Express benefits and offers. Enrollment may be required for select American Express benefits and offers. Visit americanexpress.com to learn more.
Note: Some of the offers mentioned below may have changed or are no longer be available. You can view current offers here.
Update 3/6/14: This post is outdated. See Master Thread: Holds on United Awards
In What You Need to Know about United Award Holds, I ran through the two ways to hold a United award online:
- Any award that contains a partner segment can be held for free if your account does not have sufficient miles to ticket the award immediately. Bill wrote about this trick at length with screen shots.
- Any award can be held through the PayPal trick as long as you do have sufficient miles in the account.
The first trick is dead!
How can you now hold a United award?
My friend Naveen alerted me last night that the Reserve button was gone from united.com when you select an itinerary with one or more partner segments and your account has insufficient miles to ticket the award.
For instance, my United account has 6,500 miles in it. I selected a one way award from Tokyo to Los Angeles on ANA that costs 35,000 miles.
Until yesterday, right above the gray Back button, in the screen shot below, there would have been a blue Reserve button.
Luckily the PayPal trick lives.
The only award I have enough miles to ticket is a one way interisland award within Hawaii, which costs 6k miles.
I selected such a flight and went through the steps of the PayPal trick.
The trick worked and the award is on hold in my United account for the next few days.
The ability to hold United awards when you didn’t have enough miles to ticket right away was crucial to how I booked United awards. It looks like we’ve lost that ability.
I take solace that we can still use the PayPal trick to hold awards, but the general trend toward removing the ability to hold awards by US airlines is bad news.
The gold standard remains American Airlines, which allows courtesy five-day holds on all awards online or by phone.
Just getting started in the world of points and miles? The Chase Sapphire Preferred is the best card for you to start with.
With a bonus of 60,000 points after $4,000 spend in the first 3 months, 5x points on travel booked through the Chase Travel℠ and 3x points on restaurants, streaming services, and online groceries (excluding Target, Walmart, and wholesale clubs), this card truly cannot be beat for getting started!
Editorial Disclaimer: The editorial content is not provided or commissioned by the credit card issuers. Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone, not those of the credit card issuers, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the credit card issuers.
The comments section below is not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser’s responsibility to ensure all questions are answered.
Very good! It means more seats available!
A few more, but I don’t think many people were using this trick.
AA, the gold standard, told me they cannot hold awards for longer than 24 hours if there is an Iberia segment. Is this just nonsense best handled with HUCA? Or is there some substance to this claim?
Some substance I think.
UA agents always hold awards for me via phone whenever I request, no questions asked. Don’t know if you’d have to call in to ticket or if they’d let you ticket online.
When was the last time you did this?
I haven’t heard of anyone having success holding awards over the phone recently. Whenever I’ve tested the waters here, agents always say “We book all the way through.”
I’m already dizzy from trying to figure out why United doesn’t like allowing a hold for 24 hours.
I assume you’re being sarcastic…?
Is using farelock to hold award reservations also not an option now?
I tried to book an award trip for a friend this weekend with award travel. The United agent wouldn’t let me pay $$ for farelock. I wanted my friend to be able to review the itinerary one last time before committing and transfering miles from UR to United. The agent said farelock was for revenue tickets only. Even if I talked her into holding the award with farelock, the “people behind the scenes” reviewing the booking would cancel it immediately, because it wasn’t a revenue ticket. Really?
She also said there was an exception. If we were to purchase points, then we could use farelock to hold the award until United added points to the account.
What do you think?
Was your award United flights only? If so, farelock might indeed be gone. If it had partner flights, farelock was never an option.
Well that explains all the grief. I didn’t know that farelock wasn’t an option in conjunction with partner flights. And, after today’s post on a hack using “DoNotTrackMe”, I may not have to resort to trying to use farelock when putting together a complicated itinerary. Thanks for the help!
[…] weeks ago, I wrote that United had ended free holds online for award […]