Originally Posted by
Omotenashi Concierge
First, and most importantly, the Flying Blue agent told me explicitly that cancelling my ticket will have the award ticket return to its original fare class. It would pop-up within a minute or two after cancelling, and I should continuously refresh the availability of my desired itinerary as soon as she cancelled the ticket. The ticket then indeed appeared in its original fare class again, despite it thus not being available before.
Being told, in your specific case, that the seat would become available at the same rate DOES NOT mean that there is a rule of the type you've imputed; there are many scenarios in which a seat will be made available at the same rate - including the scenario in which seats are already still available at that rate anyway - and not by the application of this "rule".
Just because a seat will reopen in most cases does not mean that there is a hard and fast rule that every cancelled seat MUST reopen at the same rate.
Originally Posted by
Omotenashi Concierge
This has also been the case with previous award tickets that I wanted to change, with some agents simply cancelling the ticket and telling me to purchase a new one.
That is how Flying Blue processes "changes"; there is no such thing as a change, just a cancel and rebook. The agents here were not telling you to do this because it would have no impact on the price - because in many cases it CAN have an impact, the price CAN change (either upwards or downwards) - but because that is the only way that "changes" are allowed in Flying Blue.
Originally Posted by
Omotenashi Concierge
Another example is ‘reserving’ a ticket, where you reach the payment page of an award booking and the booking is taken out of the inventory for a few hours even if you do not complete the payment. It will show up under ‘My Trip’ for a few hours, but once it has disappeared, it immediately gets released back into the inventory. You can test this yourself.
That example is meaningless to the current question; no ticket was ever actually issued, so there was no ticket to cancel.
Over a year ago, I booked a Flying Blue award, in J class, from East Coast USA to AMS on a direct KLM flight for January of this year, for the cheapest possible rate (which, at the time, was 56,500 miles). A few months later I got a notice of cancellation - KLM cancelled the flights on Mondays during winter on this route. I was automatically rebooked to the direct flight on the Sunday, but as the event I was there for was happening on the Sunday that wasn't acceptable. I rang up to see what they could do, and I was rebooked onto a connecting Air France itinerary on the Monday. I had checked the prices for flights on this route and they were now higher; as it was an involuntary change there was, of course, no extra payment required.
About 2 months before travelling, I found a reasonably priced SAS cash ticket, so I ended up cancelling that Flying Blue booking (and the Avios booking I had to get there in the first place). When I cancelled my ticket, there was no new seat available at the 56,500 rate to either Paris or Amsterdam on the date of travel or any other day that week - I did check. The prices on the Monday had gone up even further than when I had been rebooked onto that Air France flight - around 150k each day that week.