Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
Welcome to FT!, mitchellhThere is no fee to cancel a flight, there is a fee to use the flight credit for another flight.
This is partially true ... you can easily cancel the flight, but the problem is that you are (contractually) prohibited from using the coupons on a ticket out of order. So, even if you cancel the outbound, the ticket must be reissued in order to use the return coupon. United requires charging the change fee on any voluntary reissues, so he'll get hit with the change fee when that happens ... so essentially it ends up being the same as a change fee to cancel.
That, and most agents will refuse to change a PNR without reissuing the ticket to match the changes on the PNR anyway.
Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
You need to figure your cost of changes on the average. If you are changing a advance ticket on average twice, buying last minutes OW tickets are cheaper -- you are even approaching costs of changeable fares. If you are occasionally changing, less than 1 times per ticket than what you are doing is probably the cheapest, only you have that data.
I concur, with one additional note: The price difference between the cheapest published SFO-LAX fare and the typical fully refundable walk-up fare on the date of departure is about $130 each way ... so not THAT much for situations where you're unsure.