Have you ever been looking at the various options for airline tickets and seen there is sometimes this other option with a huge price increase that has so much versatility? They are normally called "fully refundable" tickets or something along those line and in my experience they are 2-3 times as much as a regular ticket.
It allows for changing of dates and times or even complete cancellation of the flight up to 48 hours before the flight takes off.
So what is the purpose of this especially when you consider that there are other options that are refundable as well. For me, there are very few instances in which my travel plans change and a lot of times I don't actually have travel plans beyond my arrival in a certain country but recently, I found a situation that happened to a friend of mine where a refundable ticket was exactly what the doctor (or overzealous immigration policies) ordered.
this is an extreme example and most of the time the prices are not going to be this wild. The fully refundable tickets are always going to cost more and honestly, in my many years of traveling I cannot come up with any good idea why anyone would ever want to have one of them for a legitimate and economical purpose. Just think about it ok? Based on the prices of what is listed there you could completely change your itinerary up to 3 times before the regular economy ticket price would exceed the fully-refundable price and normally airlines will charge considerably less to change the dates or even destinations on a flight provided it stays with the same airline.
A friend of mine is an avid rock-climber and he is American. While this is not new, the tension for Americans traveling to China is pretty high and they are very serious when you arrive with a ticket to the country. He was made aware of the fact that he would need to have a ticket out of the country already booked before he would be given his visa when he arrived.
The problem for him was that based on his rock climbing itinerary, he didn't exactly know when he was going to leave or be ready to depart. The maximum visa he could get was 90 days but if he got tired of climbing or all of his buddies left, he didn't want to be stuck in a place like China for all that time while he awaited for a flight that he couldn't change.
So here is what he did.
He bought one of the "fully refundable" tickets, then got the ticket confirmation, printed it out, made sure it was legitimate, waited a few days, then cancelled the ticket and got his money back.
Easy, right? Well why did he do this?
Because in China and many other countries they will ask for proof of a flight out of the country as a condition of your visa, they do NOT however, verify that the ticket is real. The booking WAS real at one point, but even places that are as authoritarian as China is purported to be do not have access to all the airlines' flight records just like that. If they were to attempt to verify everyone's flights the line to get in the country would take days. So if you have a printout and it looks legit, they take your word for it.
Is this scamming the system a bit? Well yeah, kind of. But seeing as how the only visa my friend could get was 90 days even if he was leaving the following week on a genuinely booked flight, I don't really think there is a huge focus on making certain that you are actually going to leave on the exact day that you say you are going to. If they ask you how long you are staying and you say "10 days" you still get a stamp for 90 days.
So he told a little white lie and later on booked a flight when he was genuinely ready to go. There was no issue.
I would imagine that this is what everyone uses these refundable tickets for because for me, if I had one of those tickets and then later found out exactly what day I was going to fly. Rather than keep my overpriced refundable ticket, I would refund that ticket and then buy one of the regular ones or hell, give the pricing scheme above I would just get business class for a hell of a lot cheaper than the refundable ticket.
I do not know if this is the real reasoning behind the existence of these tickets but because they genuinely WILL refund your money with any or no explanation as to why, I think it could be a good option if you ever run into a situation where a country is demanding that you show proof of exit before letting you in.
It's a rather silly requirement anyway if you ask me. If someone was honestly looking to overstay their visa and say, work illegally, is an outgoing flight going to prevent this? I think not.