Before you call: what to have in front of you
A flight booking takes four or five minutes when the information is ready and twenty when it is not, and the difference matters because fare availability moves while you look for a passport. Have the following to hand for every passenger: the full legal name exactly as it appears on the travel document they will present, date of birth, and gender as recorded on that document. For international travel, add the passport number, issuing country and expiry date.
Then the trip itself. Which dates are genuinely fixed and which could move by a day. Which airports you can realistically use, including any second field within driving distance. Whether you need a checked bag. Whether you are connecting to something fixed at the other end — a cruise departure, a wedding, a rental counter with published closing hours. Whether anyone in the party needs assistance at the airport, is travelling with an infant on lap, or is an unaccompanied minor.
Finally, the money. A payment card in the name of a person who will be reachable to authorise the charge, and a rough ceiling. Telling an advisor your budget does not make the fare go up — fares are filed by the airline, not set by us — but it does stop us spending your time quoting cabins you were never going to buy.
Names, ID and why exactness is not pedantry
The name on an airline ticket is matched against the government-issued document you present at check-in and at the gate. For international travel that is your passport; for US domestic travel it is a REAL ID-compliant driver's licence or another form of identification TSA accepts. If the two do not match, the airline is entitled to refuse carriage, and the fact that an agency made the typo does not change that.
What airlines permit by way of correction varies more than travellers expect. A minor misspelling of one or two characters is often fixed free of charge. A changed surname after marriage usually requires documentation. A wrong first name, a missing middle name where the fare requires it, or a name in the wrong field can require a reissue at fare difference — and on some restricted and negotiated fares, a name cannot be corrected at all and the ticket must be cancelled and rebought.
Our practice is therefore to read every passenger name back, character by character where necessary, before ticketing, and to spell out anything ambiguous. Read your confirmation the moment it lands. A correction requested within minutes is almost always straightforward; the same correction requested the night before departure frequently is not. Where a correction does carry a charge, our part of it is published in the service fee schedule and the airline's part is identified separately.
Payment, 3-D Secure and the checks that look like friction
Payment is taken through the payment processor's secure channel. An advisor will not read your full card number back to you and we do not retain readable card data on our systems. Where your card issuer participates in 3-D Secure — the additional authentication step branded differently by each network — you will be asked to approve the transaction with a one-time code or through your banking app. That step is the issuer's, not ours, and it also moves liability for fraudulent use towards them, which is to your benefit.
Some bookings attract additional verification: a third-party cardholder, a high-value premium-cabin ticket, a same-day international departure, or a billing address in a different country from the point of sale. In those cases we may ask for a card authorisation form or a short verification call. Airlines take a hard line on tickets they believe were bought with a compromised card, up to cancelling them without notice, so the check protects your booking as much as it protects us.
One thing to expect: the quoted total is the charged total. Taxes, carrier-imposed charges and any Zeptotravel service fee are inside the figure you approve, in line with US DOT full-fare advertising rules. If a fare moves between quote and ticketing — which happens when a booking class empties while you are on the call — we stop and requote rather than charging a different amount. That situation and how we handle it is described in price accuracy and fare rules.
Ticketing: what happens between authorisation and your inbox
Two separate things happen when you buy a flight. First, a reservation is created — a passenger name record, the PNR, holding the seats and the passenger data, identified by a six-character airline record locator. Second, a ticket is issued against that reservation, generating a 13-digit electronic ticket number for each passenger. The ticket is the document of value; the PNR is only the container.
For the great majority of bookings both steps complete within minutes and the e-ticket receipt reaches you shortly afterwards. Some fares route through a ticketing queue instead. Negotiated and consolidator fares may need a validating action against the contract; group bookings are ticketed against a deposit schedule; a very small number of itineraries need a manual fare-construction check. Where any of that applies we say so on the call and confirm by email when the ticket number exists.
This distinction is worth holding onto, because it determines what you can do next. Seat assignments, frequent flyer numbers and special service requests attach to the PNR and can usually be added before or after ticketing. Anything involving money — a change, a refund, an upgrade — needs the ticket to exist first. The mechanics of managing the record afterwards are set out in flight reservations.
Reading your confirmation properly
Your confirmation is a document you should spend ninety seconds on, not file unread. Check the spelling of every passenger name against the passport or licence they will travel on. Check the date of each flight, including whether an overnight sector arrives the following day. Check the operating carrier, which on a codeshare is often not the airline whose flight number you booked — it determines whose baggage rules and whose check-in desk apply.
Then check the commercial detail. The fare breakdown should separate base fare, taxes and government charges, carrier-imposed surcharges and any service fee. The baggage allowance should be stated for both carry-on and checked, per passenger and per sector — compare it against our baggage reference if anything looks unusual for the route. The change and cancellation conditions of your fare should be stated in plain words, and the 24-hour risk-free cancellation deadline should be given as a date and time where it applies.
If anything is wrong, call the same day. Corrections made inside the risk-free window are usually costless; the same correction a month later frequently is not.
The first 24 hours, and what to book next
Tickets originating in the United States and issued at least seven days before departure carry a 24-hour risk-free cancellation window under US DOT rules — cancel inside it and the fare is refunded to the original form of payment. We honour that window without a service charge. Use it as a review period: confirm the names, confirm the connection times, confirm that the ground arrangements at the other end line up.
That is also the right moment to handle the rest of the trip. Seats are usually cheapest and best chosen early, covered in prebook seats; if you want a better seat in the same cabin, see upgrade seats. If a car is waiting at the other end, book it against the same file through car rental — a late-evening arrival into an off-airport branch that shuts at nine is the arrangement most likely to be broken by a retimed inbound, and it is the one an advisor holding both halves can move before it breaks. And if the plan changes entirely, flight cancellations explains what you get back, with the detail in our refund and cancellation policy.