Exchanging e-ticket for same ticket and get a refund?
 

Please forgive me if this is common knowledge - and set me straight if I'm missing something.

I was just on .bomb considering changing a ticket to Hong Kong that I bought a couple days ago. A weird thing (or what I felt was kind of weird) happened. I chose my itinerary and instead of clicking the "Change" button, I clicked on the link next to it "Check the price of the itinerary".

It brought up a lower price ($60 less than what I paid) and said that I could exchange the ticket for no fee.

So I clicked Refund and got an confirmation e-mail.

Transaction summary (totals for all passengers):

Price of new ticket(s): USD 1486.70
Service charge: USD 0.00
Total charge: USD 1486.70
Value of original ticket: USD 1546.70
Amount refunded: USD (60.00)

Is it normal? Can you always just go check and see if your ticket fare has dropped and get a refund? Have I been missing this all along?!?

This used to be true of all tickets, until they institued the $150/$250 refaring fee last year. So either you had a changable/refundable fare to begin with, you got lucky, or you hit a good bug on the web site.

Very interesting.

The fare codes on my ticket were SKSR and QKWR. Does that explain something? I'm having a hard time figuring out what those mean.

Those are typically pretty cheap fares, and usually non-refundable. I think the options are down to luck and a bug.

I figured they were cheap/non-refundable tickets. Thanks for confirming that. Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket! or maybe .bomb was paying me back for crashing on me constantly while I was trying to buy the ticket originally...