I will be attempting to secure ff tickets (Tucson - Johannesburg, Rio - Tucson) while on our LAMB cruise. So, today I called United one more time. Here's the advice the agent gave me:

On Dec. 16, book the Nov. 11, 2008 outbound flight from Tucson to Frankfurt on United. Because it is a United flight they will hold for the return.

Then, on Jan 5, book the Dec. 4, 2008 return flight from Rio. At the same time, request the Frankfurt to Johannesburg leg of outgoing flight.

Total miles required for the round-trip, open-jaw trip: 120,000pp for business.

I never quite trust advice from United agents who live in India and barely speak English. What do you experts think? Did the agent give me good advice or steer me in the wrong direction.

United - dont know how they work. I am only an AA flyer. When you call and book the outbound "ask again".

Donna - we booked using miles for ROAR 2. Since we were on Star Alliance, NOT United flights, we were limited to a 24 hour hold period. I waited to book until we were able to grab the outbound at the same time. I believe Suzanne has been able to follow the process you outline & get the tickets. The United ticket hold was 72 hours, so it's a call-back every 3 days to continue to hold the seat reservations on the outbound. We also had 120,000 miles per ticket for the award seats.

If others have a slicker way to do it than what I've outlined, please chime in.

Cheers, Anne

Different with every airline, I think. I have done the *Alliance thing, and had to call back every day, until finally an agent got a supervisor, and they held it until a day after I was allowed to book for the return. Guess you just need to get the right agent who "knows" how to make the computer hold it.

I think some airline, Delta maybe, will hold anything for 30 days?

I am going to try to book Delta paid flight and upgrade with minimum points (50Krt) and get more miles for future flights, as I still don't have enough points for a ticket!

I don't think any of them will hold for 30 days, like they used to. We had to book one-way on Delta, but use the roundtrip miles so that when the return came available we could book it. All so confusing now, it used to be a lot easier to do.

To the best of my knowledge Delta will only hold for something like 72 hours. American is the only one I know who will hold for 2 weeks (the longest I've seen).