If my customer cancels their flight, can I do the cancellation and the refund through your flight booking API?

Yes, you can usually cancel a ticket and start the refund through our flight booking API, but the amount your customer gets back and the time it takes are decided by the airline, not by us.

The normal flow is that you send the booking reference, the API goes back to the airline or the supplier holding that ticket, and it returns the cancellation charges along with the amount that would come back. You can show that to your customer, get their agreement, and only then confirm the cancellation. Once it goes through, the booking status changes in your system so your staff can see that the ticket is no longer live.

There are real limits worth knowing. Many cheap fares are not refundable at all, and on those the airline may return only certain taxes, or nothing. Some airlines, low cost carriers in particular, do not allow cancellation to be done automatically, so the request is passed to the supplier and handled by hand, which is slower. Cancelling only one passenger out of a group booking is not supported everywhere either. And even when the cancellation itself is instant, the money follows the airline's own refund cycle, so it can reach your account long after the ticket is gone.

Before you promise anything to a customer, read the fare rules that come back with the ticket in the search, because that is where the refund position is stated. It is also worth running a cancellation in the test environment first, so your staff know what to expect, and worth writing down your own policy on what you charge for handling one.