Did You Know BA & Virgin Offer FREE Cancellation If Under 24 Hours Since Booking?

Did you know that both BA & Virgin offer a cooling-off period for flight bookings? As long as you cancel within 24 hours of booking you’ll receive a full refund on your booking regardless of your ticket type (non-refundable, flexible, or booked with points.) This can be handy if shortly after booking a better flight option appears and you want to take advantage of it. Here is how to cancel if it’s under 24 hours since you’ve booked…

Cancelling a BA flight…

If you want to cancel a BA flight within 24 hours of booking the policy is…

If you have booked directly with British Airways and you notice a mistake with your booking after you have paid for your ticket(s), you can cancel your flight booking and claim a full refund without penalty, up to 24 hours from when you make the original booking. Refunds under these circumstances can be requested by calling our contact centres, with the exception of bookings made for travel within 24 hours, Avios bookings which can be managed online, and British Airways Holidays bookings made on ba.com which are not covered under this option.

You can read BA’s cancellation policy on their website here – https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/legal/customer-commitment/our-customer-commitment#cancellations

If you used Avios, as per the policy, you can cancel online for a full refund without penalty. If you paid with cash unfortunately you need to ring BA’s call centre for a refund.

You need to have booked flights only direct with BA to be able to take advantage of this policy. If you’ve booked with BA Holidays or another third-party site such as Expedia unfortunately you can’t take advantage of this policy.

Cancelling a Virgin flight

If you want to cancel a Virgin flight within 24 hours of booking the policy is…

If you make a mistake or your plans suddenly change you can easily cancel for a full refund or make flight changes for free within 24 hours, as long as you’ve made the booking at least 7 days before your flight date.

This is lot harder to find than BA’s policy. To find it you need to pretend you are booking a flight, then after you’ve selected your flights and before the payment page you’ll find the policy under ‘Fare Conditions.’

If you’ve booked with Virgin Points you can cancel up to 24h before departure for a £30 per person ‘admin fee.’

Conclusion

As you can see it’s very easy to request a refund as long as you are in the 24-hour period after making a booking. Unfortunately, no offer Airline in the UK (that we are aware of) allows you to do this without charge. Have you taken advantage of BA / Virgin’s 24-hour cancellation policy? If so, did you find it easy to get a refund?