Originally Posted by
CrazyJ82
To add some recent experience on this (I also discussed my booking in another thread), I booked a ticket on a Friday, with the e-ticket issued immediately. The charge hit my card the following Wednesday, for travel in late December.
Interestingly, and somewhat annoyingly, on the same day they charged me for a booking I had made on Thursday and then cancelled within the 24-hour grace period. I had previously received a notice that the refund has already been processed, so I imagine the credit will hit soon. But surely it might have saved them a step to jump in and not bill the card at all....
Were these flight-only tickets? If so, then these experiences may not have any relevance to the OP's position, which relates to BA Holidays.
For a flight-only ticket, the process for billing your credit card appears to be completely automatic, although BA's systems seem to take a few days to send the charge to the credit card company. Other airlines can be faster than this.
But for that reason, I'm not surprised that you still get charged for a ticket that you cancel within 24 hours. The credit card charging process presumably gets activated immediately the ticket is issued, but the refund has to be manually started and (by definition) started later.