Originally Posted by
chaschas
Thank you all for your replies, although none address what my issue is with KLM. I am saying their booking process is deceiving to someone who doesn't travel regularly. I have tried replicating what my sister did and I see exactly how she got tricked into paying 40 euros to hold a flight for 24hrs instead of just paying for it knowing she had 24hrs to cancel for a full refund.
On the page before getting in to passenger details you see this:
That is literally telling you to PAY 20 euros (her 40 euros was for two passengers) to hold a flight for 24hrs. They are offering no special LONGER hold, or no other benefits either than "here, pay us 20 euros a person to hold something we are already holding for free".
So at this point it is already very deceiving.
What you've done here is conflated the option to cancel within 24 hours with the option to save a fare for 24 hours for €20, possibly because they happen to be the same number of hours. They are however very much not the same
If you buy a flight departing more than two days later, you can cancel within 24 hours of purchase, this is true anywhere with KLM, not just in the US. When you use the "time to think" option, crucially, you
haven't bought the flight. Which means also
there is nothing to cancel. All you've done is bought the
option to buy that ticket at the fare you saw any time within the next 24 hours (or whatever timeframe it gives you -- it's not always 24 hours). If you don't, you lose that fare and have to pay instead the going rate at that moment (which, given the practices in the airline industry, can be much higher.) The idea is you can pay €20 extra now instead of potentially much more later.
So no, you are not being deceived here, you (and your sister) are not correctly understanding the information given to you.
But it gets worse, if you go into "View trip details and ticket conditions" on that same page you see this:
[...]
So again, my concern is with sneaky deceptions. KLM does not show anywhere on the booking process that there is any option other than paying this "fee" if you want the option of cancelling a flight you booked in under 24hrs. And again, this applies to someone who doesnt travel regularly. Everyone's replies to my thread are correct, of course it should be obvious, of course KLM honors the 24hr cancellation window... BUT, if you dont travel as much as we all do here, you wouldnt know this. You would get to this page after searching for the flight you wanted, and you'd see a big prominent box before clicking the "next" screen that says PAY US MONEY IF YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO CANCEL THIS FLIGHT IN THE NEXT 24HRS.
There is still no deception. The 24-hour cancellation policy is not part of the fare rules, it is a blanket exception to those rules. While I don't disagree they could be more forthcoming with this information, at no point are you given
wrong information.