Avoid Farelock: a BETTER Trick to Hold United Awards & Revenue tickets

For those that don’t know, United has introduced FARELOCK, where you pay to hold a revenue or an award reservation. A few days ago, Milevalue showed that it was possible to avoid paying for holding an award reservation.  The trick that Milevalue posted relies on the following facts:

• You must NOT have enough miles in your account for the award.
• You must add on a star alliance partner segment to be able to hold the award, even if that segment is not something you want in the first place.  A “Reserve” button as opposed to a “Farelock” option will appear only when you do this step.
• Once you are able to place the award on hold, you then have to call United to get rid of the segment you didn’t want.
• That trick cannot be used to hold revenue tickets.

Well, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could hold tickets if you did have enough miles in your account for the award?  If that was possible, you could hold the exact segments you wanted, you would not have to add on any unnecessary star alliance partner segments, and you wouldn’t have to call United to get rid of those segments.  Well, I discovered a way where you can actually do this.  One additional amazing thing about the following trick is that you can even use this to hold revenue tickets.  Interested?  I thought you would be 🙂

So, here’s how you do it. In this example, I have ~31000 miles in my United account. I will attempt to hold an award reservation for a one way flight from Houston to Frankfurt in economy. Notice that it costs 30,000 miles, so I have enough miles in my account to book this ticket.

1. Login to your United Mileage Plus account and search for the award you want.

2. Select your flight

3. On the next screen (below), you see 2 options. “Purchase your ticket now” or “Hold this itinerary and fare by purchasing Farelock today $9.99.” You want “Purchase your ticket now” and then hit “Continue on to traveler information.”

3.  Go ahead and fill in all the traveler information and pick your seat and continue until you arrive at the payment screen where you see the options below.

4.  Select Paypal as the payment option and then you will see the “Checkout with Paypal” button as shown below.

5.  Click on the “Checkout with Paypal” and you will arrive at Paypal checkout screen below.

6.  Congratulations! You have now held your itinerary.  You do not need to do anything else.  You do not actually need to fill in any information on the paypal checkout page.  It’s just that you don’t realize that a reservation / record locator was created the instant you clicked the blue “Checkout with Paypal” button on the payment page.  You can’t see your reservation because you are on this paypal checkout page.    To see it, just go to your browser url and type in United.com and check your reservations.  I promise you it’s there.  As you can see, it’s not ticketed, but is reserved without paying for Farelock!

The steps for doing this with a revenue ticket are exactly the same.  Go ahead and try it out.

Summary:
Use the above trick to hold tickets on United without paying for Farelock. You can hold revenue tickets and you can hold award tickets if you have enough miles in your account for the award.

So, find your award or revenue ticket, ignore the Farelock option, get to the payment screen and hit the “Checkout with Paypal” blue button.  Don’t enter any information at the Paypal checkout page, but instead look for your itinerary in your United account.

With this trick and Milevalue’s trick, you should be able to hold revenue tickets and award tickets no matter what the number of miles in your account.

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