Throughout the booking process, they'll reserve the seats for you (so you don't get sniped while entering your details). This changes the number of available seats on the flight, which can push it over a threshold into the next pricing bracket.
Interesting awful business model idea: make lots of bots to click around flight reservation sites and hold seats to drive the prices for those seats up, then sell the seats your bots are holding for more than they're paying and less than the now-inflated price available to everyone else. I'm sure there's a name for this, not sure if it's legal.
EDIT: bonus round: screw with airline algorithmic pricing algorithms so hard that all their models get so screwed up that they end up ditching the idea. Victory for everyone except the airlines. Use the arbitrage profits to push this agenda. I'm sure you'd get sued out of existence long before it ever worked (unless e.g. It's open-source and ran by individuals), but it'd be hilarious. This is the kind of stuff I'd fund if I were rich.
I don't think you can resell airline tickets unfortunately. Otherwise there would be companies buying up tickets months in advance, and then reselling them closer to the flight for a nice profit.
That's why you have to get your name exact, airlines now charge a lot for re-ticketing, the idea is to prevent this kind of arbitrage. In fact on long-haul travel if you misspell your name the airline will force you to create a new ticket completely and pay whatever the new price is plus a change fee (and you generally can't just cancel as there's often cancellation fees).
If you hold without ticketing you have a limited time period you can hold, furthermore if you hold and cancel above a certain threshold the airlines will get upset and effectively block you from their inventory.
You are on fire in this thread. Maybe it's time to learn to how to write browser extensions so that people can finally cause united as much pain as they cause their customers.
