United Airlines 24-hour refund policy: are non Basic Economy tickets fully refundable within 24 hours of booking? (purchase made >7days before flight)

score:5

Accepted answer

Are other ticket types also fully refundable within 24 hours of booking?

Yes. For more clarification: https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/reservations/refunds/24-hour-booking-policy.html

All tickets are eligible for cancellation with full refund. Non Basic Economy tickets may ALSO be eligible for free changes.

In practice the "free change within 24 hours" has little real benefit (other than maybe short term cash flow). If you want a change you can always cancel and book new and in fact, that's a lot cleaner and easier. For changes there is nothing magic about 24 hours. Since United has waived almost all change fees anyway, a change after 12 hour is no different from a change after 36 hours.

Anecdote: I have cancelled within 24 hours a few flights with United and never had a problem. You go on the website, hit cancel and a few days later the money returns to your credit card.

Upvote:2

As a complement to Hilmar's answer, I'd note 2 dirty tricks from United Airlines I've noticed when I booked and canceled a flight ticket with them:

Dirty Trick 1: United Airlines' website sometimes doesn't allow customers to cancel the ticket, but instead ask to call the customer service. This means one better not try to cancel after 23 hours and 59 minutes after the purchase of the flight ticket.:

We are unable to process your request. To continue with the cancellation of this trip, contact us at 1-800-UNITED-1 (1-800-864-8331).

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Dirty Trick 2: After calling the customer service and canceling a flight ticket with them, no confirmation email is sent. This means that the customer has no record of the cancelation or the cancelation request, so one has to pray that customer service representative didn't mess up. Going to https://www.united.com/en/us/manageres/mytrips, the trip is not marked as canceled, but instead most of the ticket information has disappeared.

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