On a recent spring day, I started mildly stressing about booking my family’s Thanksgiving flights for four people traveling from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina. Airfare deals have been much harder to come by in the aftermath of the pandemic due to the strong return in travel demand, so I had a feeling we needed to act fast if we were going to fly at a decent price during a popular travel period.
After an initial sticker shock of seeing flights for around $4,500 for all of us to travel round-trip during Thanksgiving, I found much more reasonable fares closer to $1,500 if we tinkered with the dates (flying on Thanksgiving proper, for instance). “We need to book our North Carolina flights ASAP!” I told my husband, whose family we were going to visit.
Fast-forward several weeks and we still hadn’t booked the flights due to the usual combination of lapses in communication and needing to coordinate time-off requests, among other issues (aka life). I went to check on the flights and they had jumped to $3,500. Distraught and frustrated that I hadn’t just booked them when they were $1,500, I bought the tickets at the new price—our procrastinating just cost us $2,000.
A couple months later, a new twist emerged: The flights had gone back down somewhat, and I had remembered a tip AFAR received from flight deal tracking service Going.com about rebooking your flight when the price drops.
During the pandemic, all the major U.S. airlines—Alaska, American, Delta, JetBlue, Hawaiian, and United—ditched their long-standing change fee policies for all but basic economy fares. (Southwest wasn’t charging a change fee even prior to the pandemic.)
That means flight changes are now much easier and won’t cost you. Previously, it often wasn’t worth it even if the fare had come down, because a change fee of $200 meant that you wouldn’t actually pay any less and could even pay quite a bit more to change a flight to take advantage of a lower fare.
But now, when a price drops, you can cancel the flight, get the travel credits, and rebook at the lower cost without incurring any fees—as long as you hadn’t booked a basic economy fare. You’ll get your money back in flight credits rather than cash, but it’s still worth a shot if you think you’ll use the credits within the time frame that they will be valid for.
How to rebook your flight when the price drops
Since I literally did this not long ago, I’ll walk you through exactly what I did.
1. Book the overpriced flight. (Whoopsies!)
2. Start checking airfares again days, weeks, or months later if you feel you maybe overpaid. I started checking back at fares a few weeks after I booked my flights. If you used a price alert tracker for your flights, you can also just leave it on and allow those alerts to keep coming to get updates regarding the pricing ups and downs for your flights.
3. Browse Google Flights and cross-check on the airline’s website to see what kind of fares you come up with. Or play with dates a little, too, if you have some flexibility. For us, I knew I was going to stick with our original carrier (United), but I could also see the case for rebooking with another airline with reduced rates and just banking the credit with the original airline you booked with.
4. If you find the fares have dropped, it’s time to pounce. In my case, I was seeing some United fares as low as $2,600, compared to the $3,500 we originally paid.
5. For each airline it might be a little different, but I’ll tell you what worked for United. I went to my United booking, but when I tried to just “change” the flight, United didn’t offer me any flight credits for making a change. So, instead, I canceled the return flight (which had a 50-minute layover at Washington Dulles that I was kicking myself for booking anyways after writing stories about how everyone should be padding their layovers). I immediately got flight credits for that flight and then rebooked it at a lower price (and with a slightly longer layover) and now have $540 in flight credits (or $135 per family member) sitting in my United account.
6. In retrospect, and with a little more confidence, I should have canceled the entire flight and rebooked it for two reasons: 1) The outgoing flight also may have been cheaper. 2) After canceling just the return leg, I realized that the one-way fares may have been higher than the lower round-trip fares I was seeing online.
7. In any case, it worked! I got the lower fare and some flight credits to spare.
Going.com confirmed my strategy. “If you want to rebook your original flight, most airlines obfuscate the process. In many cases, they won’t even show your original flight as an option when you click to change reservation,” the deal tracking site reports. “Instead, the way is to cancel your original flight, receive flight credit in exchange, and then use it to quickly rebook the new [lower] fare.”
Each airline differs slightly, so it’s not a bad idea to hop around and try a few strategies before committing. For instance, I played with the option to change my flight for a bit before realizing that canceling and rebooking was my best bet.
Again, note that this option doesn’t apply to basic economy fares, so that’s something to consider when initially booking. How do you decide if it’s worth the cheaper basic economy fare or the higher fare that might drop?
“If we’re looking at an already-very-cheap fare, or a flight in a few weeks that’s unlikely to drop in price, we’d book basic economy,” states Going. “If we’re booking a flight six months out and main economy fares are only $30 or $40 more, we’re going with that. There’s ample opportunity during those six months for the fare to drop and when it does, we want to take advantage.”
And of course, don’t forget that the “money” you get back will be in the form of a flight credit that will likely need be used within a certain period of time. So, mark your calendar to make sure you don’t lose it because you didn’t use it.
This story was originally published in August 2022, and was updated on March 27, 2024, to include current information.
