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Hi,
I am curious how others make their reservations when traveling standby. Right now I have reservations using booking.com which allows me to cancel about three days before arrival date without a cancellation fee. Up to this point, I have always been able to get a seat, but it is getting harder to travel this way.
Do any of you have special tips or tricks?
When possible, I book refundable rooms and plan ahead as best as possible with flights. I've yet to have to pay for a room that I haven't stayed in over the past 18 years of nonrevving. Sometimes, if it's tight, I'll wait until I arrive to book the first night's room and take whatever is available, then continue the trip on prebooked rooms.
Likewise, I've not had that problem. I usually have made my flights by planning ahead, checking the loads. I've had some nonrev friendly hotels that would require only a phone call if I couldn't make my flight, but I can't remember which one was that helpful, and didn't even ask for my credit card information either until I arrived. Maybe it was the Golden Nugget??? 3 days before arrival on cancellation seems a bit stiff to me. Usually only 24-48 hours for cancellation on most of my hotel bookings.
Planning and researching ahead is key, have a plan A, B, C and D if need be when flying stand by. At times this also fails, so what I do is make sure I look at the cancelation policy and try to go with hotels with very lenient cancelation policies. Maybe even contact them in advance and explain my situation (the flying stand by thing).
Lately I haven't even been making hotel reservations, actually. Just show up, and they should have a room. However, I have had a couple times before where I had a reservation but didn't think I'd make it. If worse comes to worst, you can always explain that you're an airline employee and need to cancel because you couldn't get on if you're past the deadline time, sometimes they're pretty understanding (I had run across a former airline employee, even). The worst are actually with hostels. So far I'm 0/2 in getting any sympathy, though once I was arguably within the cancellation window (one part of the email said 24 hours, the other said 48. I had to involve the bank, and they were able to do a chargeback for the $90 I was out.