Southwest trumps their “Freedom from Fees.” But, other airlines charge surprisingly high change fees on most of their tickets. While there travelers can find the occasional discount fare without penalties (usually in markets that compete directly with Southwest) most of the legacy carriers have a standard $150 change fee.
A $150 fee is a significant amount of money to change a ticket, especially when more than one passenger is traveling. Unfortunately, to the surprise and annoyance of travelers, the cost to change an airline ticket can end up being much more than simply the change fee.
So here’s a brief primer to explain the system:
The $150 fee is an “administrative service charge,” to use airline speak. The fee is PLUS any fare difference.
Admittedly, not all travel agents nor airline employees are initially clear about the rules, and airline websites often bury the exact rules in the fine print, but the information is available in reservation systems.
For travelers who are really lucky, a ticket change might mean the fare could go down. Which with SOME airlines, United for example, means you can take the penalty out of the fare difference.
For example, if you have a United Airlines ticket costing $500, and the new ticket is $400, you only pay $50 difference, because United lets you apply the ticket value towards the penalty.
Other carriers, Delta for example, charge the fee regardless. So if you have the same $500 ticket and a $400 new ticket, you pay the $150, and you MAY be able to get the difference in an electronic voucher.
What’s more likely these days, however is that the new fare is higher. Plus, if you are changing the outbound leg of a ticket with a serious advance purchase rule, that fare can be a LOT higher.
A client who had booked a 30-day advance British Airways fare to Europe called last week, saying she was battling a cold, could still take her flight that evening, but wondered what it would cost to push the trip off for 24 hours. The answer, almost $7,000 to take the same flight one day later.
Now curiously enough, most airlines are less restrictive on returns. If you’ve flown the outbound, met the minimum stay requirement, and there is space on the return flight in the original class of service, the change is usually no more than the fare penalty. (These days from $250-$500.)
The catch on changing the return, however, is that most airlines will not let you change the return on a flight before you’ve flown the outbound.They consider a change to an unused ticket to require a complete ticket reissue, at the new fare.
(In fact, most travel agents, and no doubt airline reservationists have heard countless times, “but I’m not changing the outbound.” It doesn’t matter. The airline rules say it’s a new ticket.)
Other times, a traveler may want to change a ticket with plenty of advance notice, but the fare could have expired, which means again, paying the fare difference plus a penalty. Or, perhaps, the fuel surcharge could have gone up; more than once.
One way around this problem, for someone who just wants to change a return flight, is to wait until after the outbound flight departs, assuming there looks like plenty of space is available. The danger, however, is that the flight can sell out.
Also, most airlines do allow a confirmed standby within a few hours of departure, which could be another alternative. Once again, with the caveat, if there is space.
One suggestion I make to clients who think they might change a ticket, is to try two one-way tickets, if the fare is about the same as a round-trip. (Increasingly airlines are selling one-way fares for long-haul domestic flights.)
This way, if the return changes, you don’t lose the discount on the outbound flight and vice-versa.
Another option is travel insurance, which many travelers may not think about for a “simple” airline ticket, but can save a lot of money. Most travel insurance allows cancellations for limited reasons. However, there are premium policies many insurers offer a that are a “cancel for any reason product.”
In a few cases, as mentioned above, there are some discount fares with no change fees. It also might be worth asking your travel agent or the airline for the lowest non-penalty fare available.
As with things in the airline industry, there’s no rhyme or reason to the system. A client on a San Francisco to Los Angeles trip, a nonrefundable fare with a $150 penalty was $161; a fare with no change fee was only $175.
For a flight from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, the round-trip penalty fare was $377; the nonpenalty one-way fare was $820. Go figure.
Since airline fare rules change so frequently, it’s hard to give hard and fast advice on the subject of minimizing fees. But the best advice, if you have any question about restrictions, is to do some research or ask your travel agent BEFORE you put down money for a nonrefundable ticket.
Photo: Rafa.Garcés Flickr Creative Commons
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
