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Trick Get A Refund On Flight

The idea of this consumer protection is to allow you to lock in what looks like a good deal when you spot it, while still providing a window of time for you to search for a better deal. Beyond that kind of cancellation, however, figuring out how to refund plane tickets is a lot more complicated, for a variety of reasons.

When you fly, chances are you almost always buy the cheapest ticket that serves your needs. And the cheapest tickets are almost always nonrefundable. Nevertheless, it’s sometime possible to refund plane tickets, even if they’re “nonrefundable”—with some caveats. You can often get at least part of the dollar value refunded as value toward a future ticket, and you can sometimes get the full value in cash.

At the most basic level of refunding any plane ticket, there’s one simple Department of Transportation rule that all airlines that operate in the U.S. must follow. The golden rule: Anyone who booked at least one week in advance of departure has 24 hours from the time of purchasing the ticket to cancel it in exchange for a total refund—no matter what kind of airline ticket you bought.

Canceling for an unforeseen reason of your own before starting the journey is called a “voluntary” refund, and the big domestic airlines in the U.S. and Canada do not have lockstep policies in how they all handle them. Airlines based in other parts of the world have similar but not identical policies: If you’re considering buying a ticket on one of them, check the fine print.