Time to Rescue Your Non-Refundable Travel Reservations | AD

Have you ever had a non-refundable flight or hotel reservation that you were not able to use and as a consequence lost a big sum of money? Unfortunately, this happens very often. Around 4% of all flights and holidays are no-shows. Every year, millions of people lose money on their unused travel bookings. This is an unnecessary loss and a very frustrating experience for those of us who can’t travel. Luckily, SpareFare.net has set out to solve this problem with a mission to make travel simpler.

SpareFare is an online platform connecting people who have bought flights, holiday packages or hotel rooms but can no longer use them, with people seeking discounted travel options. The process is quite simple- by transferring their booked non-refundable reservations to SpareFare buyers, sellers are able to partially or fully recover the money they paid for the trips, while buyers get a true discount of up to 50 to 60% by not paying the current price of the bookings. In addition, SpareFare offers fraud protection to both buyers and sellers. This dramatically reduces the risk of transferring flights, hotel rooms and holidays to strangers by acting as an intermediary. 

Can you really transfer a non-refundable reservation to someone else? Of course you can! Not many people are aware that over sixty airlines, from EasyJet to AirCanada, offer name changes on flight reservations for a low fee. As well, all hotels allow name changes on reservations. This allows for travel reservations to be easily transferred over to a buyer. 

You can transfer your flight to someone else if your airline allows you to change the name associated with the flight. There is always a fee for the name change and they vary from airline to airline. Most budget airlines offer name changes as part of their official policy. The name change takes only 1 minute to complete! SpareFare has prepared a list of airlines which allow name changes, including a summary of their fees and rules. 

In addition to airlines, all hotels allow name changes to reservations making it even easier to resell. If your reservation was made through an online booking agency, the name change can be done through the traveler’s online account. However, if the booking was made through the hotel directly, a simple phone call to the reception will suffice. Luckily, hotels do not charge for name changes on reservations and this means that sellers can recover even more of what they originally aid for the stay. 

You can consider SpareFare to be like Viagogo or StubHub, except it is specifically designed for travel and without ticket touters. By their nature, travel reservations are very different to event tickets like concerts and festivals. Event tickets are offered on a limited basis, there are few events in a year, and, most of the time, fans greatly outnumber the available tickets. This correspondence allows for ticket touters to take advantage of the desperation of fans looking to attend concerts or festivals. Therefore, travel and the reservations it entails, are very different. The difference being that there are many flights within a single day, provided by a variety of airlines, giving travelers a greater choice for their money. If a flight of one airline is too expensive, travelers have the freedom to refer to another airline for a better deal. Alternatively, travelers may choose a different day to travel, a different time to travel, or a different destination to travel to. This way, if a ticket touter is selling a flight expensively, travelers will not be inclined to buy because of the sheer variety of travel options. The same applies for hotels. If a touter is trying to sell a hotel room above the average rate, the buyer will simply make a booking with the hotel next door.