Can the grace period for a non-refundable ticket be leveraged to get a lower price?

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Accepted answer

A substantial number of non-refundable tickets require pre-payment when you make the booking. But you have a 24 hour grace period to change your mind and cancel the booking for a full refund.

Depending on the airline in question, when you called in to cancel your booking and the agent looked up your name, both bookings would show (possibly with matching billing data on the credit card). This unto itself might not raise a red flag, but multiple occurrences might.

Also your credit card issuer(s) might start questioning why you are paying and then having the payment refunded within 24 hours at the same merchant over and over again.

And then there is always the factor of how rapidly the airline refunds your money, you could tie up quite a bit of your credit line.

There is no law against it, though if the airline determines you are gaming the system, they have their actions. As an example in Delta's Contract of Carriage, they have the right to determine a ticket to be invalid .... "D) If Delta determines that the ticket has been purchased or used in a manner designed to circumvent applicable fare rules."

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