How to Rebook Your Flight After the Price Drops

27.03.2024 - 17:41 / afar.com / Airlines

On a recent spring day, I started mildly stressing about booking my family’s Thanksgiving flights for four people traveling from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina. Airfare deals have been much harder to come by in the aftermath of the pandemic due to the strong return in travel demand, so I had a feeling we needed to act fast if we were going to fly at a decent price during a popular travel period.

After an initial sticker shock of seeing flights for around $4,500 for all of us to travel round-trip during Thanksgiving, I found much more reasonable fares closer to $1,500 if we tinkered with the dates (flying on Thanksgiving proper, for instance). “We need to book our North Carolina flights ASAP!” I told my husband, whose family we were going to visit.

Fast-forward several weeks and we still hadn’t booked the flights due to the usual combination of lapses in communication and needing to coordinate time-off requests, among other issues (aka life). I went to check on the flights and they had jumped to $3,500. Distraught and frustrated that I hadn’t just booked them when they were $1,500, I bought the tickets at the new price—our procrastinating just cost us $2,000.

A couple months later, a new twist emerged: The flights had gone back down somewhat, and I had remembered a tip AFAR received from flight deal tracking service Going.com about rebooking your flight when the price drops.

During the pandemic, all the major U.S. airlines—Alaska, American, Delta, JetBlue, Hawaiian, and United—ditched their long-standing change fee policies for all but basic economy fares. (Southwest wasn’t charging a change fee even prior to the pandemic.)

That means flight changes are now much easier and won’t cost you. Previously, it often wasn’t worth it even if the fare had come down, because a change fee of $200 meant that you wouldn’t actually pay any less and could even pay quite a bit more to change a flight to take advantage of a lower fare.

But now, when a price drops, you can cancel the flight, get the travel credits, and rebook at the lower cost without incurring any fees—as long as you hadn’t booked a basic economy fare. You’ll get your money back in flight credits rather than cash, but it’s still worth a shot if you think you’ll use the credits within the time frame that they will be valid for.

Since I literally did this not long ago, I’ll walk you through exactly what I did.

1. Book the overpriced flight. (Whoopsies!)

2. Start checking airfares again days, weeks, or months later if you feel you maybe overpaid. I started checking back at fares a few weeks after I booked my flights. If you used a price alert tracker for your flights, you can also just leave it on and allow those alerts to keep coming to get