How to Know If Your Flight Is Canceled Before It Is Officially Announced
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic turned air travel upside down, there was still plenty of room for inconvenience – like when your flight was delayed or canceled (or when one decent airport food option was closed when you needed it most). But with so many overbooked tickets in the past year, in the next few weeks or months, you may have a flight that you can no longer fly on (remember when people thought we would get up and now function as normal society). ?).
Rather than waiting for the airline to send you a cancellation notice for your upcoming flight, The Points Guy’s Nick Yuen simply shared a method of getting this information ahead of time – in some cases even earlier than the airline. Here’s how to do it and when it might come in handy.
How to know if your flight is canceled
Ewen begins by talking about his family’s plans to travel to Asia in May 2020 (which, of course, never materialized, but were rebooked for May 2021) to explain why this method is useful. Feel free to read this part , but we’ll get to the tip.
Although major airlines have been adjusting (and adjusting) routes and schedules for almost a year, the process is still ongoing. In fact, flight schedules are not approved until a few weeks before departure , Evan notes, which means you might have the following flights that appear normal when you check your booking but never take off. Here’s what he recommends to do:
Search for a flight as if you were about to buy a new ticket. If it doesn’t show up, it’s a clear sign that it will be canceled in the coming days (or weeks).
Now there is always the chance that [] a flight might just be sold out (and therefore not appear in search results), but with virtually no demand for international travel , this is almost certainly not the case.
One word of caution: The airline may be able to reinstate a canceled flight, although this is rare.
How is this information useful?
As Ewen notes, this is not necessarily a money-saving strategy. First of all, thanks to new – and much more flexible – airline policies since the start of the pandemic, if you need or want to cancel or change your flight, you can easily do so in advance in exchange for rebooking to another flight or getting travel packages.
And in situations where you want to cancel a flight entirely, you’d better wait until your travel date to see if the airline is canceling something on its own. Ewen says this is because if you take the first step and cancel your flight before the airline departs, you will likely be left with a voucher instead of a full refund (in case it matters to you).
But, as Ewen writes , this information is useful for peace of mind. Here’s what it has to do with his revamped trip to Asia:
I know that we are not going to Asia in May and I intend to cancel both our departure and the return flight. Knowing almost for sure that our Japan Airlines itinerary will be undergoing major changes in the next few weeks, I can say that I should not rush to cancel. Otherwise, I will be left with less flexible travel credit.
I would prefer to get my miles back and receive a full refund of taxes and fees. After all, there is no guarantee that our trip will take place in 2022.
But this trick can come in handy even without a pandemic, as life can change between when you book a trip and actually take it, giving you a better chance of getting a refund.