Picture a composite, entirely illustrative file: a Schengen visa applicant, no real name attached, sitting on a consular officer's desk alongside a passport, a bank statement, and three different attempts at proving onward travel. One is a refundable fare. One is a 24-hour hold. One is a dummy ticket, also called an onward ticket, a real booking made for visa or border-check purposes without paying for the flight. Only one of the three actually survives the file review intact.

Exhibit one: the refundable fare

A refundable fare looks, on paper, like the safest option: buy the flight, get the receipt, cancel later if plans change. The problem is cost. A refundable economy fare on most legacy carriers runs well above the equivalent non-refundable price, sometimes double, and cancelling it back doesn't happen instantly. It's a fully paid ticket sitting on your bank statement for the entire review period, which is fine if you're prepared to actually fly it, and expensive if you aren't.

For a single, low-stakes application, that expense might be acceptable insurance. For a repeat traveller applying for visas several times a year, it adds up fast, and it ties up a meaningful amount of money against a flight that most applicants have no intention of actually boarding. That's not a flaw in the fare itself. It's simply a document being used for a purpose it wasn't priced for.

Exhibit two: the 24-hour hold

A 24-hour hold or free-cancellation window looks cheaper, and it is, right up until the visa timeline doesn't cooperate. British Airways, like most major carriers, offers a short cancellation window after booking, detailed on its own booking conditions page, but that window closes long before most consular processing does. A ticket booked to satisfy a same-day document check works. A ticket meant to sit in a file for two or three weeks while an application is processed does not, because it either gets cancelled automatically or becomes a fully paid commitment the moment the window closes.

Exhibit three: the dummy ticket

This is the one built for exactly this problem. A dummy ticket is a genuine PNR, issued through a real airline booking system, that shows a specific route and date without requiring payment for the flight itself. It survives the entire review period because there's no clock running against it the way there is with a 24-hour hold, and it doesn't tie up the applicant's funds the way a fully paid refundable fare does. It isn't free, since the booking service itself has a cost, but it's built specifically to answer the "how are you leaving" question without either of the other two exhibits' drawbacks.

What the reviewing officer actually weighs

Consular and border staff aren't grading tickets on price. They're checking whether the document in front of them is real, current, and consistent with the rest of the file. The European Commission's guidance on Schengen visa applications makes clear that supporting documents need to be genuine and verifiable, not necessarily expensive. A dummy ticket that verifies cleanly on the airline's own system meets that bar the same way a fully paid ticket would. A screenshot that doesn't correspond to a live booking doesn't, regardless of which of the three exhibits it was dressed up as.

Building a file that doesn't raise questions

Name matching your passport exactly, dates that make sense against your stated trip length, and a booking reference that pulls up on the airline's own site when checked. Those three things matter more than which of the three exhibits you chose. A dummy ticket that's actually a live reservation, not a mockup, holds up the same way a real one does under review, and it's the only one of the three that's designed to survive sitting in a file for as long as processing actually takes. Cost matters less than verifiability. That's the whole distinction.

Return to the composite file. The refundable fare gets set aside because it's needlessly expensive for what it's meant to prove. The 24-hour hold gets flagged because it's already lapsed by the time anyone looks at it twice. The dummy ticket is the one that's still live, still verifiable, and still dated sensibly, weeks after it was booked. None of that is about which option looks more convincing on the surface. It's about which one is still a real, checkable reservation by the time somebody actually checks it.

That timing gap is the entire reason this decision matters more than people expect. A visa application, a border check, and an airline's own check-in desk all operate on different clocks, and a document that's perfectly valid for one can have already expired for another. Treating "I have a ticket" as a single fixed fact, rather than something with its own shelf life, is where most of these files run into trouble.

If you've already had a booking rejected because it didn't verify, our document case study on free dummy ticket generators covers the most common reason that happens, and our piece on how long an onward ticket PNR actually stays valid is worth reading before you assume any booking will still be live by the time your application is decided.

Need a ticket built to survive the review, not just the receipt? Book a verifiable onward ticket before you submit your file.