When planning an international trip, it can be difficult to find flights to book using airline points, especially when traveling to a popular destination during peak season. Flights tend to be full, and airlines may not make award seats available.
In order to find an award seat at a reasonable price, you’ll need to think outside the box. You might have to consider booking from a different airport and using positioning flights. Alternatively, you can explore airline alliances and use the program that offers seats for the lowest amount of points. However, using an unfamiliar program does come with some risks, as I recently discovered when I had to cancel our flight to Barcelona.
Europe is a popular destination at the moment and award seats are hard to find. Planning a trip around a cruise makes it more difficult as your travel dates are pretty much set in stone, with only a tiny bit of wiggle room. When I was looking for flights to Barcelona, I couldn’t find any great choices for business class seats using miles. I decided I’d book the best thing I could find and if anything better showed up before the trip, I’d cancel and re-book.
Finding Award Flights
I found seats in Premium Economy with Air France from Boston, with a connection in Paris. We’d have to get to Boston, but that’s not difficult from Orlando. Even better, the price was only 44,000 Flying Blue points.
Purchasing the same ticket would cost over $2,200. In theory, this would be equivalent to getting 5 cents per point value. I was OK with booking a premium economy seat on Air France because the transatlantic flight is 6 & 1/2 hours, which isn’t long enough to get a full night of sleep, even on a lie-flat bed.
What I didn’t do was look at the Flying Blue rules if you want to change or cancel an award ticket. This ended up costing me when I needed to cancel the flight.
Canceling Award Flights
I went to my confirmation email to find out how to cancel the flights since I’m not familiar with the Flying Blue program. There was a link that took me to the Air France website, where I booked the flight. That’s the first time I realized redepositing miles into my account wasn’t going to be free.
Flying Blue charges a EUR 70 fee for refunding an award ticket. I went through the process online and requested a refund. The seat selection fee was refunded immediately. The remainder of the taxes and fees were “To be determined.” I’d never seen this before but I decided it would be best to let the process work itself out.
It took less than a day to receive the email from Flying Blue. The miles were deposited back in my account and I received a refund of $146.20 (I’m not sure why the email shows the price incorrectly.)
I’m delighted to inform you that 44 000 Miles per ticket have been credited to your Flying Blue space. I also inform you that 46.20 USD per ticket corresponding to the airport taxes have been refunded on the credit card provided for purchasing the ticket.
The 75 USD per ticket for the penalty were charged on the same credit card used
Unfortunately, I had to pay a $75 per ticket penalty to cancel the flights. I’m not sure about the exchange rate or if Flying Blue makes it a flat $75 fee for US members instead of charging EUR 70.
Could I Have Avoided the Fee?
I could have potentially avoided paying a penalty fee by waiting to see if the flight times changed. If the change was significant enough, I might have been able to cancel the ticket without incurring the fee. However, this would have required waiting to see if any changes occurred and then remembering to cancel the ticket.
At the moment, my priority is to put this trip behind me. I now have the miles back in my account and can use them for future travel if necessary. I also know to be more cautious about jumping to make temporary plans with Flying Blue because it will cost $75 per ticket to make any changes or refund the ticket.
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1 comment
Pretty much all non USA airlines charge cancellation fees. However, especially for United, it may make sense to pay an occasional cancellation fee on Aeroplan or Lifemiles as their awards are so much lower priced than Mileage Plus. Same goes for American, where it sometimes makes sense to redeem Avios through either BA or Iberia instead of redeeming on AA. Again you pay the cancellation fee, but BA/IB are transfer partners to most credit card issuers transferrable points programs and AA, well good luck transferring miles into AAdvantage.