A student with two Mumbai–Toronto tickets for mid-August and no visa in hand asked whether tickets can be resold or the passenger names changed. The thread's hard-won lessons:
- Name changes/reselling: nobody confirmed it works. No member endorsed transferring tickets to other passengers — airline tickets are generally non-transferable. Don't plan around this.
- Call the airline and say you're a student waiting on a visa. This was the one success story in the thread: a member's sibling called customer care, explained the visa delay, and the airline accommodated a reschedule. Airlines do sometimes flex for student requests — but it's not guaranteed; the poster tried 4–5 times and was told no August/September economy seats existed.
- Compare the reschedule fee against a new ticket. The poster was quoted roughly ₹1.1 lakh per ticket to reschedule — on top of ₹1.45 lakh already paid, nearly ₹2.5 lakh one-way per person. When change fees approach new-fare prices, rescheduling stops making sense.
- Peak-season availability is the real constraint. August–September seats to Canada sell out; even a willing airline can't reschedule you into seats that don't exist.
- The prevention that worked for one family: book fares with a free reschedule/cancellation window (e.g. cancellable up to 72 hours before departure). If the visa doesn't come, you cancel clean.
The underlying rule members kept circling: don't buy restrictive tickets before the passport is back.