American Airlines Ended 24-Hour Refunds On Last-Minute Tickets — How To Still Get Your Money Back

Here’s how the new American Airlines 24-hour refund policy works, and how to get around it and still get refunds on last-minute tickets purchased inside a week from planned travel. I broke the news on Thursday that American Airlines cut its 24-hour refund window to the legal minimum: standard paid tickets now qualify only for a refund if purchased at least seven days — exactly 168 hours — prior to departure, replacing its more generous cutoff of two days prior to departure. This means that for close-in bookings (within a week of departure), cancellation generally means receiving an expiring travel credit rather than a refund. Here’s exactly how this works, and this is crucial: the policy is that you have exactly 24 hours from ticket purchase to process the refund. That is different than ‘until the next day’. Sometimes policies like this give you ‘until midnight the next day’ (and therefore more than just 24 hours). Not here! This is American’s internal policy memo to agents on the change: If you’d going to take advantage of a 24-hour cancel with American Airlines, you need to initiate that before those 24 hours are up. Usually you can cancel tickets purchased through American Airlines online. However, if that doesn’t work for some reason and you need to call, your call may not be answered right away. Your 24 hours could run out while you’re on hold, so don’t wait until the last minute. And if you’re booking inside of a week, it can be advantageous not to book your American Airlines tickets directly with American. While online travel agencies no longer publish their own generous 24-hour cancellation policies, some still honor them. Priceline does, for instance (though could stop at any point in the future). A reader flags for me that theirs gives you a business day, too, so “if you book on a Friday, you typically get until Monday night” and the policy applies regardless of how close-in you book. Of course, booking through Priceline means they’re the one that has to service the booking. You’re dealing with them in the event of changes in advance of travel rather than American Airlines directly, but you’re much less likely to be facing change when booking inside of a week than when you buy travel months in advance. When I first wrote about this, American hadn’t updated its website properly, so there was still contradictory information about what the deadline for 24 hour refunds was. That’s been corrected. However, they haven’t updated the policy for refunding paid seat assignments. The American Airlines Main Cabin and Main Cabin Extra pages still use the former two-day threshold for refunding paid seats. It’s funny, I don’t proofread my own posts for typos but American really should pay me for proofreading their website… Topics on this page