Cancelling/changing ticket within 24 hours

What you may be missing is that I am unaware any law or regulation requiring 24 hour exchange or refund. And there is a huge difference between refund and exchange. Some airlines may have that policy but certainly not all.

"I am unaware any law or regulation requiring 24 hour exchange or refund. "

Frank, read this.

Only cancellation, not exchange.

I'm no lawyer, but after reading the federal regulations and WOW's policy, I think they are patently in violation of the federal regulations. The regulations require them to give you 24 hours to cancel. If you book a ticket at 8:00 am GMT and decide after 12 hours, after the customer service office was closed, to cancel it, you can not. You will not have 24 hours to cancel, as required by the federal regulation.

I hope someone reports this situation to the department of transportation and WOW gets heavily fined or banned.

So it sounds like you have not purchased the ticket? If so, you probably won't see the cancel button. It probably shows on your reservation

"Cancel button"? The T&C for WOW specifically states, "All cancellations must be done over the phone only."

From the WOW homepage (www.onetravel.com), click on "customer support", then on "cancel flight booking online". Cancel online on the pop-up form.

The federal regulations state, "carriers may not deceive consumers about the 24-hour reservation requirement". Posting on the T&C that all cancellation requests must be by phone, when there is actually an online form, is deceptive.

Thanks everybody for your responses. They help me feel that I am not a complete idiot! I was mistaken about the changes being allowed within 24 hours, but I was pretty sure I was right about cancellation being allowed within 24 hours. I am booking for two people from two different states who want to travel together to Europe together (a friend and I) and open-jaws. And one-way flights TO the US on WOW have to be booked as two tickets, Europe to KEF, KEF to US. AND our plans weren't totally pinned down. So you can see this was rather complicated (for me, anyway), and I made sure that I had 24 hours to cancel if needed. I also did the buying over several days because I never had enough time at one shot to do it all.

Carol, by now I have bought 6 tickets from WOW and haven't seen a cancel button yet!
Lee, I'm not sure how the link to Onetravel fits in here?

Anyway, I bought the first ticket one evening. An hour or so later I realized that that one wasn't going to work. I also realized that I was going to have to stay up till midnight to cancel it. I bought a couple of more tickets. At midnight I called in and cancelled the first with no problem.

The next afternoon after getting home from work I continued to work on the project and also reviewed what I had already purchased. At that point I realized that even if I wanted to cancel the tickets bought the night before (before midnight), I wasn't going to be able to because the 24 hour period would be up before Customer Service would open.

At this point I was definitely locked into flying WOW. So I thought about the last tickets I needed to buy and realized that the weekend was coming up and Customer Service wouldn't be open at all within the next 24 hours.

That's when I posted here to see what other travelers thought. Anyway, the tickets are bought. I am not really unhappy with how it worked out, but it all seemed strange to me!

Thanks for "listening"!

There is a very important "OR" in the rule. Airlines must allow a refund of a purchased ticker OR allow a hold without payment for 24 hours. Every US based airline I have dealt with took the refund approach EXCEPT American Airlines. They only allow a hold. If you purchase an AA ticket, you are stuck with it.

Some airline are even more flexible with the refunds and changes, you have to check with each airline. And if you purchase a full fare ticket that allows refunds and changes without fees the rule really doesn't apply