What to Do When the Price Drops After You Book

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Pre-pandemic, when you booked a flight, your dates were pretty-well locked in. (Well, 24 hours after you booked.) If you wanted to change or cancel, you had to pay a $200+ penalty in addition to any fare difference. But since 2020, the major US airlines got rid of those penalties. (American, Delta, United, Alaska, Hawaiian, JetBlue all joined Southwest in axing change/cancellation fees; Spirit and other budget carriers—shockingly—still have penalties.) This flexibility is awesome for two reasons, one expected and one unexpected. First, you can change your travel dates post-booking without paying an egregious fee. Great! But you may not have realized the second opportunity: if you book a flight and the fare later drops, you can often rebook and save the difference.  How to rebook after a price drop Let’s say you’ve booked a flight from Chicago to Seattle for $200 one way on Alaska. Two weeks after you booked, though, the price of your flight drops to $125. Pre-2020, rebooking wouldn’t have been worth it because you would’ve incurred more change fees than the $75 savings. But today, that $75 can be yours. Just pull up your flight reservation on the airline’s website and look for a link to Change or Cancel the flight, as below:   If you wanted a different flight or different dates, click Change reservation. The process is simple, and if the new flight is cheaper, you’ll get airline travel credit. But 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. Instead, the way is to cancel your original flight, receive $200 Alaska flight credit in exchange, and then use it to quickly rebook the new $125 fare. End result: same flight and $75 in flight credit.  Doesn’t apply for basic economy The new policy of free changes and cancellations comes with a major carveout: it doesn’t apply for basic economy tickets. As lovers of cheap flights, we dislike this fact. But it’s an important consideration when deciding which fare to choose. 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. 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.  Flight credit, not cash The last caveat to be keenly aware of is that when you change or cancel a reservation, you get flight credit, not a cash refund. (If the airline is the one to cancel or significantly change your flight, you’re eligible for cash.) Travel credit typically needs to be used within 12 months of being issued.