✈️ Which flights can you cancel within 24 hours?

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 32 seconds

Good morning from beautiful Jakarta, the city I was supposed to spend one day in but have now been in for almost two weeks.

And I’m fine with it. This is one of the best cities I’ve ever been to!

And here’s one of the best newsletters YOU’VE ever been to (or something like that):

• 🤗 We’re starting a weekly newsletter!

• ✈️ Which flights have free 24-hour cancellation?

• 🌎 Oneworld to introduce alliance-wide upgrades

🤗 We’re starting a weekly newsletter!

First things first, our daily newsletter isn’t going anywhere.

Exhale in relief.

We are simply adding what we’ll call a Daily Drop Weekend Round-Up that will hit your inboxes once a week, on the weekend, but only if you want it to (more on that later) 🎉

We’ve heard you loud and clear on this one—you might be the ultimate time-crunched traveler, or you might find a daily newsletter “too much” for your travel needs.

Perhaps a weekly email is more your style…. 😏

Here’s what to expect from our Weekend Round-Ups:

• We’ll highlight our favorite and best hack of the week

• Summarize other solid deals, tips, and news

• Slip in an occasional new hack or tidbit that drops on the weekend

You fine folk have the option to subscribe to both the daily and weekly newsletters, choose to only receive one or the other, or opt to not receive any newsletters at all (but don’t pick this one 😭).

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✈️ Which flights have free 24-hour cancellation?

We all have those moments where we book an impulsive flight, only to wake up in the morning questioning everything. It’s one of the great joys of travel.

Thankfully, many airlines have policies that allow for free cancellation of tickets within 24 hours of making a booking, including the following:

• Delta

• American

• United

• Air Canada

• Alaska

• Southwest

• Many, many more

But what you might not know is that there is actually a LAW in the United States that requires this 24-hour cancellation policy, though with some caveats.

Here are the details of the law:

• Any flight to, from, or within the U.S. can be canceled within 24 hours of booking

• It must be at least seven days prior to the flight departure

• This applies to any airline, whether or not it is a U.S. airline (as long as the flight is to/from the U.S.)

• This applies to direct bookings as well as with online travel agencies (like Expedia, for example)

So why is this important?

While the airlines I referenced earlier are pretty transparent about these policies, many airlines are NOT so transparent…

For example, I recently booked a flight from Dakar, Senegal, to New York City using Flying Blue miles.

Since I knew about this law that allowed for 24-hour cancellation, I decided to lock in the ticket, do some more research for the trip, and decide the next day if I could make it work.

I ultimately decided to cancel the flight.

Weirdly, however, the Flying Blue refund request page still showed that a $50 fee would be charged for cancellation (which is their standard cancellation fee).

I suspect that maybe if I had proceeded to cancel my flight online, I would not have been charged the fee (because… well… the law), but I decided to just call instead.

Sure enough, after 30 seconds on the phone with support, they canceled my flight for free. Again, because… law.

So here’s the bottom line:

Some airlines might not make this law extremely clear. So make sure you know your rights when it comes to requirements surrounding booking and canceling flights to, from, or within the U.S. 👍🇺🇸

🌎 Oneworld to introduce alliance-wide upgrades

Getting upgraded to a nicer seat on a plane is one of life’s few true pleasures.

After all, there’s nothing quite like spending 6, 7, 8, or more hours in a lie-flat bed instead of a tiny economy seat that literally nobody can fit in.

The only issue with this is that if you use your miles to book a partner award flight, you’re often not left with any options for upgrading.

But for the Oneworld alliance, this will be changing soon thanks to the implementation of alliance-wide upgrades, which will include airlines like:

• American

• British Airways

• Qatar

• Qantas

• Cathay Pacific

Here’s what this means:

Basically, the general idea is that you will be able to use various point currencies to upgrade your flight on various Oneworld airlines.

Now, we don’t have the details of how exactly this will work, but the concept isn’t new.

For example, Star Alliance allows you to use miles to upgrade your flight across multiple airlines, as long as you’ve booked into a specific fare class already (a.k.a. the expensive-ass economy tickets).

There are a number of other caveats and restrictions to this system, but we can probably expect something similar from Oneworld when their upgrade program launches later this year.

So here’s what this could mean for you, specifically:

Let’s say you book a flexible economy cash fare on American Airlines, like this one:

Theoretically, you could then use a points currency like British Airways Avios to upgrade yourself to business class.

This could potentially be really meaningful.

That’s because while American Airlines miles are quite difficult to earn, BA Avios are extremely easy to earn since you can transfer points to them from pretty much every major credit card.

As I said, we don’t know the full details yet, so this is all pure speculation.

But for you Oneworld fans, I’d start building up your Avios and AA miles balances in preparation - it might unlock some sweet premium flight opportunities down the road.

One of my favorite ways to learn about new travel hacks is in our very own Daily Drop Lounge, an online community of DD fans and travel hackers.

And unlike your local airport lounge, you won’t have any trouble getting into the Daily Drop Lounge. 😉

Here’s a look at a post from this past week if you want a taste of what you’re missing:

That’s all for this week, kiddos. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a weekend with some much-needed rest…

Speaking of the weekend, are you gonna sign up for our Weekend Round-Up newsletter??

Either way, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you first thing Monday morning. ❤️

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