Non-refundable Y-Fare saga continues - any way to get full MCO value?
 

Ok, so last December, I booked myself and a contractor a Y fare to Cancun on a business trip that ended up being cancelled. Whoops, guess all Y fares are not refundable - leaving me with about a $1k credit after the change fee. I don't usually buy Y fares but we needed the F baggage allowance and priced it in to the contract we were servicing.

As you might imagine, it's tough to book $1k of airfare at a time, but I did manage to use $400 at once with a plan to use the rest on a Hawaii or Europe trip. So far no luck on either, so I have $600 sitting in an MCO, but no $600 airfares to spend it on.

Is there ANY way to reliably get the full value out of the MCO without actually having a $600 ticket? I've already paid the change fee, so I'm obviously a bit irked that the airline doesn't really want to give me back all of my value on what was indeed a Y-fare purchase (flexibility my butt).


I have unintentionally circumvented the system once when I used a $600 MCO against a $1k ticket that I canceled within the 24 hours - the MCO got kicked back as a paper TCV, which I then was able to use for a $300ish ticket and get the residual value back as an additional paper TCV. But I think that may not have been policy and just the agent trying to get the 24-hour courtesy refund to work.