The airline says call the agency. The agency says call the airline.
The short answer
When an airline cancels a flight you bought through an online travel agency, the document that decides what you can demand is the airline's own Conditions of Carriage, which 14 CFR § 253.4 incorporates into your ticket — not the private ticketing arrangements between airlines and agencies that decide which system can physically reissue it. That answer differs by airline: American commits to "the next American Airlines flight with available seats at no additional cost" and Delta to "Delta's next flight on which seats are available", neither conditioned on who sold the ticket, while Southwest only "may offer" a seat and names a refund to your original form of payment as your exclusive remedy.
Both of them are describing something real, which is why the loop is so hard to escape. The agency holds the ticket in its own booking system, so the airline’s desk agent genuinely cannot reissue it there. But whether the airline owes you a seat is a different question, decided by a different document — the Conditions of Carriage, which 14 CFR 253.4(a) makes part of your ticket. Three of the four largest US airlines’ contracts say nothing at all about who sold it. One says the opposite. Below is each one, in its own words.
Which answer applies to you
The airline decides the answer and so does the cause. Where you bought the ticket does not, at three of the four — which is the part a desk agent is least likely to volunteer.
Ask them for the seat. Their contract commits to it.
American Airlines' Conditions of Carriage commit to carrying you on their own next available flight, and the clause says nothing about who sold the ticket. Being told to go back to Expedia is not what that contract says. The wording and a script are below.
Read from the four contracts themselves, on the dates shown. Where the wording is quotable it is quoted exactly; where it came out of a PDF that cannot be reassembled character for character, it is described and the section number given instead.
American Airlines
Committed
What they commit toRebooking your delayed / canceled flight
When your flight is canceled or a delay could cause you to miss your connection, we'll rebook you on the next American Airlines flight with available seats at no additional cost.
On another airline
If no American flights are available until the next day, and the disruption is caused by us, we’ll rebook you on one of our partner airlines with available seats at no additional cost.
The contract contains no clause conditioning rebooking on where the ticket was bought, and no mention of a global distribution system or an authorised ticket agent. The rebooking commitment is therefore stated without regard to the sales channel.
What they cap
If we or our airline partner cancels your flight or your departure or arrival is delayed for 3 or more hours (domestic) / 4 or more hours (international), our sole obligation is to refund the unused ticket value and any optional fees according to our involuntary refunds policy, subject to our policy for rebooking your delayed / canceled flight.
If they cancelled or badly delayed your flight
My flight has been cancelled or significantly delayed and I did not cause it. I bought this ticket through a travel agency rather than from you directly.
Under 14 CFR § 253.4, the terms of your Conditions of Carriage are incorporated into my ticket, so they are terms of my contract with you.
Your current Conditions of Carriage state:
"When your flight is canceled or a delay could cause you to miss your connection, we'll rebook you on the next American Airlines flight with available seats at no additional cost."
I am asking for the next available seat that this contract promises. Nothing about the agency that sold me the ticket appears in that clause.
If you need to check the wording, § 253.4(b) requires you to keep the full text of that term available at the ticket counter.
Please confirm what you are able to do and note this request on the record.
Verified by hand rather than by our weekly checker, because this airline refuses automated requests.
Delta Air Lines
Committed
What they commit toRule 19.A, Delta's Liability in the Event of Schedule Changes, Delays and Flight Cancellations
If the passenger does not request cancellation and refund of the remaining portion of the ticket, Delta will transport the passenger to the destination on Delta’s next flight on which seats are available in the class of service originally purchased.
On another airline
At Delta’s sole discretion and if acceptable to the passenger, Delta may arrange for the passenger to travel on another Carrier or via ground transportation.
Tickets an agency soldRule 6.G, External Reissue Charge
Delta will collect a nonrefundable fee of USD $50.00 for reissue by Delta of tickets originally issued in the United States or Canada by any ticketing source other than Delta, however, the charge does not apply to same day confirmed transactions, irregular operations or schedule change situations, SkyMiles upgrade reissues, tickets reissued on delta.com, or tickets issued at military or government fares.
The most useful sentence in any of these contracts. Delta contemplates reissuing a ticket that another ticketing source sold, prices that service at $50, and then waives the $50 precisely for irregular operations and schedule changes. A passenger told to go back to their agency during a disruption can point at Delta's own fee schedule for the answer.
What they cap
Delta will not be liable under any circumstances for any special, incidental or consequential damages arising from the foregoing.
If they cancelled or badly delayed your flight
My flight has been cancelled or significantly delayed and I did not cause it. I bought this ticket through a travel agency rather than from you directly.
Under 14 CFR § 253.4, the terms of your Conditions of Carriage are incorporated into my ticket, so they are terms of my contract with you.
Your current Conditions of Carriage state:
"If the passenger does not request cancellation and refund of the remaining portion of the ticket, Delta will transport the passenger to the destination on Delta’s next flight on which seats are available in the class of service originally purchased."
I am asking for the next available seat that this contract promises. Nothing about the agency that sold me the ticket appears in that clause.
If you need to check the wording, § 253.4(b) requires you to keep the full text of that term available at the ticket counter.
Please confirm what you are able to do and note this request on the record.
Southwest Airlines
Not committedTickets an agency sold
What they commit toSection 9.b(1)(i)
Southwest states that it may offer to carry the passenger at no additional charge on its next flight with space available, in accordance with its established re-accommodation practices. The verb is permissive, not a commitment.
On another airline
Section 4.b(1) states that Southwest accepts only Southwest tickets, and that tickets issued in conjunction with travel on another airline are not accepted except where federal regulation requires it or at Southwest's sole discretion.
Tickets an agency soldSection 4.a(6)(i)-(ii)
Southwest states that for a passenger holding a ticket issued by an authorised ticket agent through a global distribution system, flight changes, ticket exchanges and refunds must be processed through the ticket's original booking source so that the funds stay accessible to that source.
The gate agent who says 'go back to your agency' is following the contract for a voluntary change. During a Southwest-caused disruption, Section 9 governs instead and the agency-ticket rule does not remove the refund.
The catch
The next subsection states that if such a passenger exchanges, cancels or surrenders the ticket through a Southwest system or agent instead, the funds become nonrefundable and are held as flight credit.
What limits thatSection 4.a(6)(ii) closing words, read with Section 9.b(1)(iii) and 9.b(2)
That nonrefundability is expressly made 'subject to Section 9'. Where Southwest cancels or significantly delays or changes the flight, Section 9.b(1)(iii) states the passenger is eligible for a refund to the original form of payment, and 9.b(2) calls that refund the passenger's exclusive remedy. The penalty therefore attaches to a voluntary change, not to a disruption Southwest caused.
What you get when they cancelSection 9.b(1)(iii)
Where Southwest cancels or significantly delays or changes a flight and the passenger neither accepts alternative transportation nor elects to hold the value as flight credit, the passenger is eligible for a refund to the original form of payment under Section 4(c)(3)(i)-(vii).
What they capSection 9.b(2)
Southwest states that a refund to the original form of payment is the passenger's exclusive remedy for a Southwest cancellation or a significantly delayed or changed flight, and that its liability is limited to the unused portion of the reservation.
If they cancelled or badly delayed your flight
My flight has been cancelled or significantly delayed and I did not cause it. I bought this ticket through a travel agency rather than from you directly.
Under 14 CFR § 253.4, the terms of your Conditions of Carriage are incorporated into my ticket, so they are terms of my contract with you.
I am asking for a refund to my original form of payment, which your contract names as my remedy for a cancellation or significant delay.
I understand your contract makes an agency-issued ticket non-refundable if I change it myself, but that provision is expressly subject to the section covering your own cancellations, which is what has happened here.
Please confirm what you are able to do and note this request on the record.
If you are changing your own plans
No script for this
Your ticket was issued by an agency and this airline's contract sends voluntary changes back to them. Have the airline do it instead and the contract turns your fare into non-refundable credit, so there is nothing here worth reading to a desk agent.
This contract is a PDF. Its wording is recovered accurately but its letter spacing is not, so nothing here is presented as a direct quote.
United Airlines
United's contract page renders its text client-side and returned 188 characters of body copy to a plain request; later attempts were refused outright. We hold no United contract text.
If they cancelled or badly delayed your flight
No script for this
We do not hold this airline's contract text, so we will not put words in their mouth. There is nothing to quote and nothing to demand on paper.
Why the two phone queues disagree
A ticket lives in whichever reservation system issued it. Sell through Expedia and the ticket sits under Expedia’s control, so an airline agent looking at your flight often cannot reissue it from their own screen. That is a commercial arrangement between airlines and agencies, published nowhere you can cite, and it is the honest reason a gate agent tells you to call the agency.
Those arrangements live in agreements between airlines and their accredited agents — the IATA framework a desk agent is describing when they say they cannot touch your booking. We do not quote them anywhere on this site, because they are not published documents we can link you to, and a demand built on a rule you cannot produce is worth nothing at a counter.
It is also not an answer to the question you are asking. What the airline owes you is a contract term, and 14 CFR 253.4(a) makes the Conditions of Carriage part of the ticket you bought — you are a party to it however you paid. So the useful move is not to argue about systems. It is to read the airline its own sentence and ask for the seat that sentence promises.
A small demand that is hard to refuse
The carrier must keep the full text of every incorporated term available for public inspection at its ticket offices and must post it free of charge to a passenger who asks. That is a small, checkable demand a passenger can make without argument.
14 CFR 253.4(b)-(c)
If you have read otherwise
The claim in circulation
Because you booked through an online travel agency, the airline cannot rebook you and you have to sort a cancelled flight out with the agency.
What is actually true
That is true of the booking record and not of the contract. Neither American's rebooking commitment nor Delta's Rule 19.A is conditioned on who sold the ticket, and Delta prices reissuing a ticket "issued in the United States or Canada by any ticketing source other than Delta" at $50 while stating the charge "does not apply to ... irregular operations or schedule change situations" — a fee it would not need to waive if it could not process those tickets. Southwest is the genuine exception: its contract routes agency-issued tickets back to the agency, and for its own cancellations names a refund to your original form of payment as your exclusive remedy.
Where the confusion comes from
Whichever system holds the ticket is the one that can reissue it, and for an agency ticket that is the agency's. That is a real constraint on a desk agent's keyboard, and it gets relayed to passengers as a limit on what the airline owes them, which is a different question decided by a different document.
Travel columns, forum posts and AI assistants still tell stranded passengers to "invoke Rule 240" and make the airline put them on another carrier's flight.
What is actually true
No US airline has a Rule 240 to invoke. Rule 240 was a provision of the tariffs airlines filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board, the agency that regulated fares and routes until deregulation closed it at the end of 1984. Delta's current Contract of Carriage is numbered Rule 1 through Rule 24 and contains no Rule 240; American's is not numbered that way at all. Ask for the clause that exists instead — for Delta that is Rule 19.A, which commits it to "Delta's next flight on which seats are available", and for American it is the rebooking commitment quoted above.
Where the confusion comes from
Rule 240 genuinely was the rule to cite before 1978, and travel-advice columns kept recommending it by number for decades after the tariffs it lived in stopped being filed. That advice is still online in volume, so it is what language models learned, and they repeat it with the confidence of the original columns.
Every clause above is read from the airline’s own contract on the date shown, and check-coc-drift.mjs re-checks the quotable ones weekly against the live pages, so a reworded clause fails our build rather than sitting here wrong. Where a contract came out of a PDF we give the section number and describe it instead of quoting, because the extraction recovers wording but not spacing. This is a summary of published contract terms, not legal advice — whether your particular disruption was within the carrier’s control is a question of fact, and the DOT aviation consumer complaint form is where a refusal goes next.
FAQ
Agency tickets — common questions
Answers drawn from the airlines' published contracts, with the clause named so you can check it. This is not legal advice.
How do I check whether a travel agency is legitimate?
There is no federal register of travel agencies in the United States, which is the first thing worth knowing, because it means the checks that exist are industry and state ones. The most useful is ARC Check, run by the Airlines Reporting Corporation at arccorp.com: it confirms whether an agency is accredited and, more to the point, whether it holds ticketing authority — an agency that can issue airline tickets directly has been vetted and is bonded. Separately, California, Florida and Washington run seller-of-travel registration schemes, and California's is searchable through the Attorney General's Seller of Travel system. Note what a registration does and does not tell you: under California Business and Professions Code § 17550.24 it is expressly not state approval, only evidence the company followed the law to register.
Is it safer to book directly with the airline?
For anything that might go wrong, yes, and not because agencies are disreputable — because it removes a party from the conversation. A ticket the airline issued is a ticket the airline can reissue at a desk at two in the morning, and the refund unwinds through the same card that paid. Add an agency and the ticket sits in a different system, the money took a different path, and the two can disagree about which of them is holding you up. Where the agency fare is materially cheaper it can still be the right choice; the question worth asking first is what the fare difference buys you against the cost of an unwinnable argument on a disrupted trip.
What does it mean when my ticket says to see an agent?
It means the ticket is in a state the airport kiosk and the airline's own app will not resolve on their own, and it almost always follows a disruption: the coupon has been left open after a cancellation, or the itinerary has been rebuilt and needs revalidating. The instruction is procedural rather than a verdict on who owes you what. Take it as a prompt to get to a human — the airline's desk if the airline cancelled, the agency if the change is to a ticket it issued — and to ask for the disruption's stated cause in writing while you are there, since that cause decides what is owed and gets much harder to establish later.
Is the travel agency or the airline responsible for my refund?
Both, for different parts, and being passed between them is the normal experience rather than bad luck. The money went to whoever charged your card, so an agency booking is refunded through the agency and that is where the payment has to unwind. The obligation to refund, though, is the airline's: for a flight touching the United States, 14 CFR part 260 binds the carrier and does not distinguish by who sold the ticket, and the DOT has repeatedly enforced against carriers for refunds on agency-issued tickets. In practice, put the demand to the airline citing the provision, in writing, and copy the agency — an agency that is refusing tends to move once the carrier has acknowledged the obligation.
Can a third-party site cancel my flight without telling me?
It can cancel the booking it holds, which is not quite the same as your flight disappearing, and the distinction matters when you are trying to work out what happened. An agency can void or cancel a ticket it issued, and a fare it never actually paid for can be cancelled by the airline for non-payment days after you received a confirmation. What neither can do is remove your entitlement once the airline itself cancels the flight. If you are unsure which happened, the airline's own record is the one to check: ask it directly whether a booking reference is still live rather than relying on the agency's email.
The airline told me they cannot touch a ticket I bought on Expedia. Is that true?
It is true of the booking record and not of what they owe you. Whichever system issued the ticket is the one that can reissue it, and for an agency ticket that is the agency's — that part is real. But what the airline owes you after cancelling your flight is decided by its Conditions of Carriage, and neither American's rebooking commitment nor Delta's Rule 19.A mentions who sold the ticket. Delta goes further and prices reissuing a ticket it did not sell at $50, then exempts irregular operations and schedule changes from the charge, which is not a fee you would write if you could not process those tickets at all.
Should I ask the desk agent to invoke Rule 240?
No. Rule 240 was a provision of the tariffs airlines filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board, which deregulation closed at the end of 1984. Delta's current contract is numbered Rule 1 through Rule 24 and has no Rule 240; American's is not numbered that way at all. Asking for it by number tells the agent you are reading advice written for a different era, and it costs you the credibility you need for the next sentence. Quote the clause that exists instead — both are on this page.
Why does this tool ask whether the airline caused the disruption?
Because at Southwest the answer reverses. Southwest routes agency-issued tickets back to the agency, and if you have Southwest change one instead, its contract turns your fare into non-refundable flight credit. That penalty is written subject to Section 9, so it does not reach a flight Southwest cancelled — in that case Section 9.b(1)(iii) makes you eligible for a refund to your original form of payment, and 9.b(2) calls that refund your exclusive remedy. Same airline, same ticket, opposite advice depending on who caused the change.
Can I demand a seat on a different airline?
Not as an entitlement. American's commitment is to the next American flight with available seats; its partner-airline provision is conditional, and Delta's is at its sole discretion. Asking for a partner-airline seat as though the contract promised it invites a refusal that makes everything else you say sound uninformed. Ask for what is written, and treat another carrier as something to negotiate rather than to demand.
Why is United missing from this page?
United's contract page renders its text with JavaScript and refuses automated requests, so we hold no United contract text. American serves the same page to a browser but returns 403 to our checker, so its text is verified by hand on a 90-day clock rather than weekly. Neither is a claim about intent — bot mitigation is ordinary infrastructure. It does mean we will not publish a United clause we cannot read, and we will not paraphrase one.
Do you need my booking reference?
No, and we do not want it. Nothing on this page requires a record locator, a ticket number or your name, because the answer comes from the airline's published contract rather than from your reservation. If you call our agents, they can talk you through your contract rights or book you an independent rescue flight; they will not take over the ticket your agency issued.
Stuck between a chatbot and a hold queue?
Our agents can talk you through which of the clauses above applies to your flight, or book you an independent rescue flight if you need to be somewhere tonight. To be exact about what we do not do: we will not take over the ticket your agency issued, and we do not need your booking reference to help.
Airline phone queues and chatbots are where a rebooking stalls. Our agents work these routes daily and will look at what is actually available, walk through the letter you are about to send, and tell you what a desk agent will and will not do. We are not the airline and we do not file claims for you — the templates above are yours to send.