Originally Posted by
Xandrios
It depends on what kind of trip you're booking. If something complex, with multiple separate airlines/tickets and various hotel bookings, there is always a chance that one of these booking processes may error out. Prices may jump up while booking. When you have expedia's payment page say "Sorry, this itinerary just went up $1000" its awfully nice to have the option to reconsider your trip and be allowed to cancel the already booked flights.
Same for when you find a great flight deal with very low availability. Book the flight first, then look for hotel options. Sometimes hotels are so expensive that it makes more sense to then choose to fly another date, even if flights are a little more expensive then. So at that point it makes sense to cancel that flight booking within 24h.
Seems a rather convoluted example, and surely not one that correlates with every KL booking you make, I hope!
However, in this strategy, it is the hotel booking/Expedia booking that you expect to be problematic, so why not perhaps make that first?
My point is - it's all very well to have the option of falling back on a 24 hour cancellation, but it's still far less work to wait and make the booking only when you know you need it, and not before. Saves you the extra time of cancelling and waiting/checking for refund to clear.
(And in the timeframe you've given above, you presumably are making your Expedia booking in almost the same session, so re-ordering the booking flow would make more sense - the KLM flights aren't going to jump in price in the next 15 minutes! I don't see any logic to a sequencing of events such that you make your KLM booking, and then wait until the 24 hours is almost exhausted before booking the "problematic" parts of the trip...)