I just got a PTA from someone who cancelled theirs and they immediately put my info in and was able to grab that same PTA.
After 2:30AM seems to work okay using the "cancel as me/reclaim as someone else" method.
I saw a Feb 22 PTA appointment appear at 2:18AM, and it was gone in seconds. Must be others up with the owls swapping reservations besides me.
I had 2 browser windows open -- one to cancel, and one to view available appointments. Canceled, refreshed available appointments 3 times to see the one I canceled, then immediately clicked it to keep anyone else from snagging it.
IMO, trying to coordinate with another person to take your appointment is risky. Just give the appointment "giver" your info, so only one person has to be ready to take the cancelled reservation. If you are just a little slow, you may miss it. Three to five seconds is all it seems to take for an appointment to vanish.
I would not be surprised if there are automated BOTs refreshing the reservation page every 5 seconds and filling out the appointment forms when they find one. There are so few fields to fill in, it would not be difficult to set up. I've done this in the past to "scrape" information from form-driven webpages on a recurring basis so I wouldn't have to do it manually.
Anyway, if you snooze, you lose. Omni proved that yesterday by canceling an appointment he meant to reserve for me. **POOF!** Gone in seconds.
