The Stunt
Sometimes travel hackers get stuck with a ticket that’s got a cancellation fee (I’m looking at you and your stupid $75 award ticket redeposit fee FlyingBlue) or a ticket that simply isn’t cancellable for any fee even if you’re Steve Buscemi (actually, especially if you’re Steve Buscemi). You’ve got two choices if your plans change and you’re not going to take one of those flights:
- Pay the fee to cancel if you can, or just eat the ticket cost if you can’t
- Play the odds and hope that you don’t need to do either of the above
Playing the odds means waiting for the airline to offer free changes or refunds due to one of:
- An air traffic control strike (prolly in France)
- A schedule change to a future flight
- A weather event
- An airline meltdown
- A significant departure delay for any reason
- Because there’s a pregnant turtle on the runway
When one of those things happens you won’t be taking off for Lubbock, but instead you’re headed to refund-town (but you’ve probably got to request the refund from the airline, and in some cases before departure). The odds aren’t great though; at best the chances of this working are somewhere between 1/6 and 1/10, unless you own a pregnant turtle.
The Gotchas
There are a few ways this can malfunction:
- You forget to cancel before the cancellation window expires after the game didn’t work, which matters especially with programs like Virgin Atlantic that require you to cancel before the check-in window opens
- You don’t request a refund in a timely manner from the airline
- The airline disagrees about what a significant delay is (but 2+ hours is usually sufficient)
Personally I put a reminder in my phone for an hour before the flight or cancellation window, whichever comes first, to figure out whether the stunt is going to work and to pay the cancellation fee if I can and it didn’t.
Good luck!
AA’s new Flagship First catering meal concept: “playing chicken with an airline”. They’ll end up cutting the ketchup at launch for cost savings though.