Continental.com Gets Rid Of Hold Feature…Or Does It???

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One of the most useful features of continental.com was the hold feature.
It allowed you to keep holding a ticket at a certain price so that:
1. If it were to go down in price, you would just cancel the higher price hold, and hold it at the lower price.
2. If it were to go up in price you could buy it at the lower hold price.
Yesterday continental got rid of the ability to officially hold a reservation, in the language of continental.com, “Note: When signed in, OnePass members may request a refund within 24 hours of purchase. The option to hold your reservation is no longer available.”
The ability to refund a reservation is obviously much less useful than holding one.

Now for the fun part!
As I was looking for a ticket today, i went through the process of purchasing one until the final payment page, when i saw this option under the normal credit card option, “When paying with cash, your reservation is held until midnight Sat., Nov. 19, 2005 Central Time and must be purchased by that time or it will be cancelled.”

So I wondered, what if I choose this, and then go back and put in a credit card? Worth a shot, no?
Well, it works!
All you have to do is use the cash option, and then it will be on hold, and at any point after that you can complete the purchase by switching the payment choice to credit card!!!

As an ironic side note, yesterday united.com just added the ability to hold flights. (To my knowlegde the only other site that lets you hold flights is aa.com)