somewhat morbid question
 

My family is planning a trip at the end of the summer to visit a sick family member. However, there is a chance that she may pass away before we travel. If so, we would have no reason to travel to her city. (She will be buried in our city, so everyone will be traveling to us once she passes away.)

I would like to know which airline has the most generous policy for changing the destination city of the ticket because if she is gone by the end of August, we would like to use the tickets to travel to another city.

Should I tell the airline that I book with my situation ahead of time to see if they can make a notation that we can change the destination at a nominal charge?

Thanks for your input.

Southwest lets you change your ticket without a change fee. Most of the other airlines charge a $100 change fee.

I see from your profile you are part of the TrueBlue Program. I just changed a ticket with Jet Blue for $23.

It's also possible you can get insurance for the ticket based on the company and how close of a realtive it is.

You could also do a full fare ticket, but that probably doesn't make any sense.

I would ask the airlines what their change policy is, very few would just let you change it.

Actually, the change fee imposed by most airlines is wholly dependent upon the fare class purchased -- $100 is not a set value for all tickets in all circumstances. (AA, for example, has certain change fees that are as low as $30, depending on the route.)

The easy answer to the OP's question that avoids the entire issue of change fees altogether is, incidentally, the purchase of refundable tickets.

Mike

A good website to compare policies and prices of various travel insurance companies is http://www.insuremytrip.com/.