If I had a penny for every time I booked a nonrefundable flight too far in advance, plans changed, and I couldn’t take the flight, I would have a handful of pennies and still no refund.
Refundable flights tend to be at least twice as expensive as the no-frills nonrefundable fee-to-change flights, so I never buy them. You can usually change a flight for a fee of $100-200 plus the fare difference, but this is often not practical: I usually end up finding my new flight from a different airline, so I can’t change, and at any rate, if my original flight cost $150 and the change fee is $150 plus the difference in fare, well, there’s really no reason to change the flight instead of just buying a new one.
Refundable flights tend to be at least twice as expensive as the no-frills nonrefundable fee-to-change flights, so I never buy them. You can usually change a flight for a fee of $100-200 plus the fare difference, but this is often not practical: I usually end up finding my new flight from a different airline, so I can’t change, and at any rate, if my original flight cost $150 and the change fee is $150 plus the difference in fare, well, there’s really no reason to change the flight instead of just buying a new one.
HOWEVER, it turns out there IS a way to get a partial refund on nearly every flight (at least for non-North American carriers): a tax refund (but not in the way you’re thinking). If you just shoot an email to the airline and ask for a refund of the taxes on your unused flight, almost every airline will give you a refund; at least, it’s worked for me with as varied airlines as European discount carriers Ryanair, WowAir, and Norwegian, along with a travel agent that booked a Qatar Airways flight for me. (However, when I contacted the Canadian carrier, WestJet, for a tax refund, they had no idea what I was talking about, and the Chase travel agents were also confused.) Now, they’ll never give it to you if you don’t ask, but I’ve found that after asking, they automatically process it, no arguments. Many airlines will even do this YEARS later! Those taxes can range from $5 for a domestic flight to over $100; I recently got (well, narrowly missed, more on this later) a $40 refund on a one-way unused flight from three years ago with Norwegian, with the ticket originally costing only about $140, and even a sort-of-sketchy travel agent that I got a great deal with is currently processing a 96 pound refund on a round-trip flight between the UK and Thailand, which originally cost only 323 pounds. That’s nearly ⅓ of my money back!
The only real caveat here is that some airlines give you a short time limit (such as Ryanair’s one month allowance) to ask for this refund. Additionally, they will refund the account with which the originally ticket was bought; this was pretty frustrating when I tried to get my taxes back from Norwegian, but I had closed the account a month before and the bank couldn’t reopen it, but hey, as they say in Thailand, mai pen rai, it’s all good, c’est la vie.
tl;dr: Go through your backlogs of unused or cancelled flights and email the airline or travel agency for a tax reimbursement. You will probably get about $50 back per leg.
No comments:
Post a Comment