Is it possible to buy a standby ticket weeks in advance and not choose your destination?

score:2

Accepted answer

Is it possible to buy a standby ticket weeks in advance and not choose your destination?

It's certainly possible, but it depends heavily on the airline and the ticket rules for the specific ticket. Every airline's accommodation tickets work differently and there are often multiple programs in the same airline.

Stand-by means "we will only take you if there are open seats on the plane at time of gate closing". There is always the possibility that the flight is full and what happens then, depends on the terms of the specific ticket. Options include "too bad so sad", "refund", "wait for the next flight", "reroute", "go somewhere else" etc.

One data point: A good friend of mine uses free stand-by flights granted as an airline employee family member. He doesn't pay anything for the tickets but can't make reservations either. So he looks at the number of open seats and tries to determine the routing that's most likely to succeed. That doesn't always work out: if one of the legs in his original itinerary sells out, he needs to reroute or add a stop over somewhere.

For him it would be perfectly normal to end up somewhere else than originally planned or to adapt travel plans dynamically on the go. In general low-revenue or no-revenue tickets are the most likely to get bumped when flights get full, when there are problems or simply if the airline has a chance to make more money off someone else.

More post

Search Posts

Related post