Plane ticket rental

When planning a holiday, it’s typical to book a return flight, especially for overseas trips where deals are often more enticing, especially with non-budget airlines. However, when exploring regions like Southeast Asia for an extended period, deciding on the next destination or the duration of stay can be uncertain. In such situations, it’s common to make plans upon arrival, leveraging affordable transportation options like buses or trains to neighboring countries. Yet, this spontaneity may not sit well with immigration officials. To avoid purchasing potentially unused tickets, there are alternative solutions that seasoned travelers and digital nomads have embraced for years. Below, we outline three tried-and-tested options to navigate this challenge seamlessly.

Flexible tickets

This is the most expensive method of all three. In this case, we buy the ticket with a modification option (which can be sometimes much more expensive than the base ticket price), and in the case of luck we can change the destination, in the less fortunate case we can only change the date. If you buy with a modification option, you will not be charged for changing the ticket, but you will have to pay the difference between the fares.

Fortunately, when we bought our ticket from India to Thailand, there was little difference between base and flexi prices, so we bought flexi. Fortunately, this came in handy as we were able to bring the ticket date forward for just € 10.

Plane ticket rental

This is the second most expensive option, but it still costs only around €10-20. In this case, the ticket will be rented for 24-48 hours (extensions are possible with several companies), without having to deal with cancellations or modifications yourself.

We can find several pages which are dealing with ticket rental:

• bestonwardticket.com – 12 USD, you get the plane ticket within 5-30 minutes and it can be extended for 20 days for free
• onwardflights.com – according to the reviews they are not giving confirmation number (PNR) which may cause issue if the ticket is going to be checked at the border, but this is the cheapest option for 7 USD
• flightreservationforvisa.com – they also offer cancellable hotels and train tickets
• onewayfly.com – it has a pretty hefty price for 19 EUR, but they give a plane ticket valid for 2 weeks, so you can even apply for visa at the embassy with them

We shall be careful with Fly Onward, according to the reviews on Trustpilot after your money is taken, you will not receive the plane ticket.

24-hour free cancellation

Many major airlines give you the opportunity to modify or cancel your ticket for free within the first 24 hours. Perhaps the easiest way to find them is to use www.expedia.com. You shall stay always stay on the US page, don’t get redirected to any regional sites.

As soon as you have chosen your departure and arrival airports and dates, Expedia will give you several options, it is important that you choose the one where you see the 24 hour cancellation option.

In the end this is going to be the cheapest option since we will get our money back fully (but be careful and check that the fees shall be 0), but for couple of days we need to live without this sum. (We got it back in half a day, but it can be up to 7-10 business days as well.)