Originally Posted by
AxelJF
Some questions for the experts here on cancelling award bookings.
a) if I cancel my award booking, how quickly do I get my miles back into the account?
b) if I used miles for my award booking that were otherwise expired by now, and if I cancel that booking, what happens to the miles? Do they simply disappear? is the counter reset? Do I have grace period in which I can use them again? (a day, a week, a month?)
Are you cancelling completely on your own initiative, or have there been schedule changes or flight cancellations? If the latter is the case, perhaps my experience is relevant. I had a trip with ANA to Japan for March 2022 booked as a *A award through TAP, as two single tickets. Japan stayed closed to us gaijins so I wouldn't be able to travel, but thankfully ANA cancelled one of my flights and there was a schedule change of a couple of hours on the other, just days before I was due to depart. This meant I could cancel both of the single trips for free. In this case, I was told that expired miles were extended by one year. (I had a Club Platinum so it could be that they would have been extended anyway.) As I remember it, the miles returned within a couple of days or maybe a week. Refunding of the cash component took significantly longer.
But based on experience from other airlines, if you cancel an award trip booked with expired points (and there are no special or mitigating circumstances), you simply lose those points, I'm afraid.