Question on Flight Booking

[FreddyST]

Hey guys hope one of you can answer my question!

 

I am applying for a tourist visa for China and I need to provide return flight details. I am unsure of my exact travel plans as yet as I have been thinking of doing some overland travel via a third country and not going direct from the UK.

 

I have found flights that are fully refundable if you cancel within 24 hours. If I book the flight in the morning, submit my application with the booking confirmation in the afternoon and then cancel the flight is there any way that the embassy can find out the flight has been cancelled?

 

Ideally I would wait until I have the visa in hand to cancel but it will take 4 days to get the visa and the flight must be cancelled in 24 hours. This sounds a bit paranoid but is there any actual way for the visa service to check with the airline whether the flight booking I provide is still real? Or do they just require the booking for admin/ticking box purposes? I cannot really see how they could check with the airline as that would surely break some sort of privacy law??

 

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

Fred

[Silent]

I don't think they can check apart from the confirmation you provide them. To be honest I'm not sure any more or I provided them with flight details at all, but that was before the latest changes of the rules.

 

If you really don't know what you want to do it becomes a different issue, but a return flight from a nearby country should pose no problems. What you might do is contact the embassy explain your situation and see what they say. A trick with booking and cancelling may work well, but personally I prefer to be as truthfully as possible, basically you sign that you supplied correct data.

[roddy]

I don't think we've ever seen any indication that embassies can check flight reservation data, and I'd be very surprised if they do. If you're worried, you could maybe get a pricier but fully-refundable ticket and hold on to it for longer.