travelers.so

LEGAL

Refund and Cancellation Policy

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What happens to your money if a trip is cancelled, stated plainly — including the part that is not in your favour.

1. The rule, in one paragraph

If you cancel a booking, you receive exactly what the airline returns to us, and no more. The advisor’s markup and the service fee are not refunded. If the airline returns nothing — which is what a non-refundable fare means — then you receive nothing back, and the markup and service fee are still retained.

That is the whole rule. Everything below explains how it plays out, but nothing below changes it.

2. Booking is not switched on yet

travelers.so cannot currently take a payment or issue a ticket, so nobody has a booking to cancel. This policy describes how cancellation works once booking is enabled.

3. Why the fee and markup are retained

They pay for work that has already happened: sourcing the trip, pricing it, booking it, and then cancelling it. That work is not undone by the cancellation. We would rather say so here than let you discover it from a refund that is smaller than you expected.

You are shown the service fee as a separate line before you pay, so it is never a surprise at the point of purchase either.

TO BE COMPLETED — confirm this is the intended commercial policy

This page states the rule as the software currently implements it: the airline’s refund passes straight through and the whole margin is retained. An alternative that has been discussed is a non-refundable service fee with the markup returned pro rata. If the intended policy is the second one, the code must change before this page does — a policy page that promises a refund the system does not pay is worse than one that states an unfavourable rule honestly.

4. The airline decides what is refundable

Every fare carries its own rules. Some are fully refundable, some refundable minus a penalty, and many are not refundable at all. Those rules are set by the airline, not by travelers.so, and travelers.so cannot override them or make an exception to them.

Before your booking is cancelled, we ask the airline — through Duffel — what it will return. That figure is the airline’s answer for your specific fare. It is not an estimate we produce.

5. How a cancellation works

  1. You ask to cancel. Only a confirmed, ticketed booking can be cancelled through us. Travel that has already been taken cannot be.
  2. We get a cancellation quote from the airline, which states what will be returned.
  3. We confirm the cancellation with the airline. Your ticket is now cancelled.
  4. We refund you the amount the airline returned, to the card you paid with.

The cancellation with the airline happens before the refund is issued, deliberately. If we refunded first and the airline then refused to cancel, we would have paid for a flight nobody is taking and given the fare back as well. In this order the worst case is a cancelled booking with a refund still owing, which is visible in our records and can be finished by hand.

6. Where the money goes back to

Refunds are returned to the original card. We cannot send a refund to a different card or to a bank account. How long it takes to appear on your statement is set by your bank, not by us.

TO BE COMPLETED — processing timeframe

State the target time between a cancellation request and the refund being issued, and say plainly that the further wait for it to appear on a statement is the bank’s. Both are things Stripe will ask about during underwriting.

7. When you are not charged in the first place

Several things can go wrong before a booking exists, and in all of them there is nothing to refund because you were never charged.

A released hold is not a refund. Depending on your bank it may still show as a pending amount for a few days before it disappears. That is the bank clearing the hold, not us taking and returning money.

8. When the outcome is unclear

Occasionally the airline’s answer to a booking request is lost in transit and we genuinely do not know whether a ticket was issued. We do not resend the request, because that could book you twice. Instead the authorization stays in place while we query the airline to establish what happened, and the booking is then either completed and charged, or released and never charged.

You may see “we are confirming your booking” while this resolves. It is not a failure, and you should not attempt to book again while it is showing.

9. Changes to a booking

travelers.so does not currently support changing a booking — changing dates, routes, or passenger names. What an airline permits, and what it charges for it, varies by fare. Contact your advisor.

TO BE COMPLETED — change requests and name corrections

Decide and state how a change request is handled operationally, whether travelers.so charges anything on top of the airline’s fee, and what happens to a name correction. Airlines charge for these and some refuse them outright.

10. If the airline cancels or changes your flight

When an airline cancels a flight, delays it significantly, or changes the schedule, what you are entitled to comes from the airline’s obligations and from passenger-rights law in the relevant jurisdiction. It is not governed by this policy, and it can be considerably more generous than this policy.

TO BE COMPLETED — airline-initiated disruption

State what travelers.so will do operationally in this situation — pursue the airline refund on the traveler’s behalf, or direct them to the airline — and whether the service fee is retained when the disruption was not the traveler’s choice. A lawyer should also confirm what passenger-rights regimes (such as EU261 or UK261) require to be disclosed at the point of sale.

11. Disputes and chargebacks

If you believe a charge is wrong, contact us first. A chargeback raised with your bank is usually slower than asking us, and it cannot recover more than a refund would.

Where a chargeback is raised, we record it immediately and provide the booking record, the price you agreed to, and the ticket the airline issued.

TO BE COMPLETED — complaints route

State how a traveler raises a complaint, who they reach, and how long a response takes. If any statutory ombudsman or ADR scheme applies in the jurisdictions sold to, it must be named here.

12. How to request a cancellation

TO BE COMPLETED — support contact

A support email address and the hours it is monitored. Cancellations are time-sensitive — a traveler needing to cancel before a departure has to be able to reach a human, and this document currently gives them no way to.

Related documents: the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.