Most people shop for a dummy ticket the night before a visa appointment, with five tabs open and no way to tell the sites apart. They all show an airline logo, a booking reference and a promise of speed. This guide gives you a short, practical way to sort the genuine services from the ones selling a picture of a booking. It covers four things that decide the matter: what the price is telling you, whether the PNR opens on the airline's own site, how and when the document reaches you, and what happens to your money if something goes wrong.
We sell flight reservations ourselves, so read this with that in mind. Everything we suggest you check, you can check on us too.
Key facts before you choose a provider
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| What are you actually buying? | A held flight reservation in your name with a booking reference (PNR). It is not a paid airline ticket and cannot be used to fly. |
| What proves it is real? | Entering the PNR and your surname on the airline's website brings up your name, route and dates. |
| What does a booking reference look like? | Emirates, for example, describes it as a six-character alphanumeric code. A ticket number is different: Emirates gives it as 13 characters.[1] |
| What is the risk of a fake? | Under the Schengen Visa Code, presenting false or forged supporting documents is a ground for refusal.[2] |
| Do embassies want a paid ticket? | Often not. Netherlands Worldwide says you do not need a paid travel ticket, and the US State Department says not to buy tickets before you have a visa.[3][4] |
| What does ours cost? | ₹699 in India or $9 elsewhere per passenger, one way or round trip, emailed in about 10 minutes. |
What separates a real provider from a scam?
One thing: a booking that exists outside the PDF. A genuine provider creates a reservation inside an airline or reservation system, and the airline can show it to anyone holding the reference and surname. A scam sells you the paperwork without the booking. The document can look perfect and still be empty.
Everything else on this page, from price to refund terms, is a secondary signal. Good manners and fast replies are pleasant. They do not tell you whether the reservation is there. Only the airline's own lookup tells you that.
A second, quieter difference is honesty about what the product is. A real provider calls it a reservation, tells you it cannot be used to board, and says the visa decision belongs to the consulate. A risky one talks about "confirmed tickets", "embassy approved" documents or a success rate. Those phrases are a sales pitch, not a description.
What should a dummy ticket cost, and what does the price tell you?
Price is a useful clue, but only in both directions. Very cheap and very expensive can both be wrong for different reasons. Here is how we read the common price points, in plain terms.
| What you see | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Free, instant, "generate your ticket" | A template filled in with your name. There is normally no reservation behind it, so the PNR does not open on any airline site. | Do not submit it to a consulate or an airline. Read the risks of free generators. |
| A modest service fee | Consistent with placing a hold and sending you the itinerary. This is the normal model for a specialist service. | Still verify the PNR. A fair price is not proof of a real booking. |
| A price close to a real fare | Either a paid refundable ticket (legitimate, but your money is tied up) or a reseller charging fare prices for a hold. | Ask plainly whether you are paying for a ticket or a reservation, and get the answer in writing. |
| A low headline price with add-ons | "Verification fee", "PNR activation", "embassy format" charges added after you start. | Ask for the total before paying. A reservation either has a PNR or it does not; there is nothing to "activate". |
For reference, our price is fixed per passenger: ₹699 in India, $9 in the USA and most other countries, KWD 2.75, OMR 3.5, QAR 33, SAR 34 or AED 33 across the Gulf, and £7 in the UK. For multi-city trips we charge per pair of legs. The full breakdown is on the dummy ticket price page. We are not saying you must pay exactly this. We are saying that a price far below what it costs to create and send a real hold should make you curious.
How do you test the PNR before you rely on it?
You test it the same way an airline agent or a careful visa officer would: on the airline's own website. It takes about two minutes. Do it the moment the document arrives, not on the morning of your appointment.
- Find the airline and the booking reference on the PDF. The airline is the carrier of the first flight. The reference is usually six letters and numbers.
- Open the airline's official site yourself. Type the address or search the airline's name. Do not use a "verify here" link sent by the provider, because a scam can send you to a page it controls.
- Go to "Manage booking" (some airlines call it "My trips"). Enter the reference and your surname exactly as on the passport.
- Compare every detail. Name spelling, flight numbers, dates and route should match the PDF and your visa form.
- Screenshot the result. Keep it with your file in case you need to show when you checked.
If the airline says it cannot find the booking, write to the provider straight away and ask for an explanation in writing. A genuine service will look into it quickly. Our step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots is in how to verify a dummy ticket before submission, and our verifiable dummy ticket guide explains what a successful lookup does and does not prove.
What should delivery look like?
A clear time, a PDF, and a reference you can read. Ours is emailed in about 10 minutes, and you can follow an order at our order tracking page. You do not need the same speed from everyone, but you do need a stated time you can hold the provider to.
Watch out for three delivery patterns:
- A screenshot in a chat. An image is easy to make and hard to check. Ask for the PDF itinerary.
- No time stated at all. "We'll send it soon" is not a delivery promise when your appointment is fixed.
- Delivery only after a second payment. If the document is held back until you pay a "release fee", stop there.
One timing tip that has nothing to do with the provider. Book close to your appointment, ideally a day or two before. A held reservation is temporary by design. On our booking form, the hold window for your route is shown before you pay, so you can see it is long enough for your date. More on turnaround in our note on dummy ticket delivery time.
What refund terms should a fair provider offer?
A fair provider puts its refund terms on a public page before you pay, and those terms cover the failures that are its own fault. If a site has no written policy, assume you have no remedy.
At minimum, we think you should get your money back when the document is not delivered, when the PNR does not open on the airline site at delivery, or when the provider gets your details wrong. Those are exactly the three cases our own cancellation and refunds policy lists for a full refund.[8] It also says, honestly, what is not refundable: a change of plans after delivery, a refused visa, or a hold that expired because it was booked too early.
Be wary of the opposite extreme too. A service that promises a refund "if your visa is refused" is either pricing that risk into a high fee or making a promise it will not keep. No reservation decides a visa, so no honest provider can sell you insurance against refusal.
How do the options compare?
You have four realistic ways to show a flight plan. They are not equally safe or equally cheap.
| Option | Opens on airline site? | Money at risk | Honest to submit? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verifiable reservation from a provider | Yes, while the hold is live | The service fee only | Yes, described as a reservation | Visa files that ask for a reservation or itinerary |
| Free generator PDF | No | Your application and future ones | No | Nothing official |
| Edited copy of someone else's booking | No, or shows another person | Refusal for a false document | No | Nothing |
| Paid refundable fare | Yes | The full fare until refunded, plus any fees | Yes | Rules that demand a paid or confirmed ticket |
If you are still deciding between a reservation and a refundable fare, dummy ticket vs refundable ticket works through the costs, and generator vs provider covers why the free route fails.
Which red flags mean you should walk away?
Any one of these is enough for us to close the tab:
- "Guaranteed visa" or "100% embassy approved". Nobody but the consulate decides.
- The provider refuses to let you check the PNR, or tells you the airline site "won't show dummy bookings".
- A verification link on their own domain instead of the airline's.
- "Valid for months" on an unpaid hold. An unpaid reservation is temporary. Promises of very long validity do not fit how holds work.
- Requests for your OTP, card PIN or netbanking password. No booking needs them.
- Payment only to a personal account with no invoice and no business name.
- Offers to "adjust" a document, such as changing a date on an existing PDF without a new booking.
- Fake urgency: "price rises in 5 minutes", countdown timers, pressure to pay before you have asked anything.
We have more examples in dummy ticket scams to avoid.
What details should you share, and what should you keep back?
A reservation needs your name exactly as in the passport, the route and dates, and an email address to receive it. Some services, ours included, let you upload a passport page to fill in names automatically, which cuts spelling errors. That is a convenience you can skip by typing the names yourself.
What you should never hand over is anything that moves money: one-time passwords, card PINs, UPI PINs, netbanking logins. Pay through a recognised payment gateway, where the card details go to the payment company and not to the seller. Ours runs through Razorpay, with UPI, cards and netbanking. Our payment safety guide and data privacy notes go further.
What if you have already paid a provider that looks fake?
Don't submit the document. A booking that does not exist does more harm in your file than a gap would. Then work through these in order:
- Check the PNR once more on the airline's own site, carefully, with the surname exactly as in the passport.
- Ask the seller in writing for a working reference or a refund, and keep the chat and payment receipt.
- If you paid by card or through a gateway, contact your bank or card issuer about a dispute.
- In India, you can report online financial fraud through the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in or the 1930 helpline.[6] Elsewhere, use your local police or consumer authority.
- Get a genuine reservation for your appointment and check it before you go.
What should you ask a provider before you pay?
Paste these into a chat. A genuine service answers each one in a sentence.
- Which airline will the reservation be on, and can I check the reference on that airline's own site?
- What is the total price for my passengers and route, with nothing added later?
- How long until I receive the PDF, and how is it sent?
- How long will the hold last for my route, and do I see that before paying?
- Where is your refund policy, and does it cover a PNR that does not open?
- Do you confirm this is a reservation and not a ticket I can fly on?
When is no reservation good enough?
Some rules ask for more than a reservation, and no provider can change that. New Zealand's guidance for visa-waiver visitors requires the onward ticket to be paid before departure.[7] A few Schengen centres also use stricter wording; the Greece checklist in Kuwait, for example, asks for a confirmed return ticket.[10] Where the official wording says paid, purchased or confirmed ticket, a held reservation may not satisfy it. Buy a refundable fare or ask the mission what it accepts.
The opposite case is common too. The UK's guidance on supporting documents lists flight bookings among the things you should not use as evidence, unless you are transiting.[5] In that situation the safest choice is not to buy anything. Airlines check onward-travel rules through IATA's Timatic database when you check in, so for proof of onward travel the airline's view matters as much as the border officer's.[9] Our requirements by country table and onward ticket page show where a reservation fits.
How does DummyTicketPrice measure up on this checklist?
Run the same tests on us. You get a reservation with a PNR in your name that you can open on the airline's Manage booking page. The price is fixed and shown before payment. The PDF is emailed in about 10 minutes. The hold window is shown on the form before you pay. Our refund terms are public. We will not tell you a visa is guaranteed, because it isn't, and we do not make edited or fake tickets.
If that suits you, book a reservation here. If you want the wider picture first, start with our dummy ticket for visa guide or the home page. Need a hotel to match? See hotel bookings for visa files.
Check us the same way
Real PNR, fixed price, refund terms in writing. ₹699 / $9 per passenger.
Frequently asked questions
How can I tell if a dummy ticket website is genuine?
Ask for the booking reference and the airline, then open that airline's own website and enter the reference with your surname under Manage booking. If your name, flights and dates appear, a reservation exists. If the airline cannot find it, there is nothing behind the PDF. Look for a written refund policy and a business you can contact as secondary signs.
Is a cheap dummy ticket always a scam?
No. A reservation is cheap to create compared with a fare, so a low service fee can be perfectly honest. What should worry you is "free" or "instant generator" wording, add-on charges that appear later, and any refusal to let you check the reference. Judge the PNR, not the price alone.
Should I click a verification link sent by the provider?
No. Go to the airline's official site yourself by typing its address, then use Manage booking. A link sent by the seller can lead to a page the seller controls, which will show whatever it wants. The only check that counts is the one on the airline's own website.
Can a provider guarantee my visa?
No. The consulate decides every application on the whole file: purpose, money, ties and history. A flight reservation is one supporting document among many. A provider promising approval is telling you it does not understand the process or is willing to mislead you, and either is a reason to look elsewhere.
What refund should I expect if the PNR doesn't work?
A full refund or a working replacement, quickly. Our own policy gives a full refund when we fail to deliver, when the PNR is not verifiable on the airline site at delivery, or when we get your details wrong. A refused visa is not refunded by anyone honest, because the reservation does not decide the visa.
Is it safe to upload my passport to a dummy ticket site?
Only if you trust the business and it explains how it stores data. You can avoid the upload entirely by typing your name exactly as printed in the passport. Never share card PINs, UPI PINs, OTPs or banking logins with any provider; a booking never needs them, and a request for them is a scam signal.
What should I do if I already submitted a fake ticket?
Do not add to the problem with explanations that are not true. Speak to the visa centre or mission about correcting your file with a genuine document, and be truthful about what you submitted. Consulates treat false documents seriously, so getting accurate advice quickly matters more than hoping nobody checks.
Sources
Last checked: October 2026.
- Emirates, Where can I find the booking reference/PNR? (booking reference and ticket number formats).
- EUR-Lex, Regulation (EC) No 810/2009 (Visa Code), consolidated text, Article 32.
- Netherlands Worldwide, Checklist: applying for a Schengen visa for tourism.
- U.S. Department of State, Visitor Visa.
- GOV.UK, Guide to supporting documents: visiting the UK.
- Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (Ministry of Home Affairs), National Cybercrime Reporting Portal and 1930 helpline.
- Immigration New Zealand, Visa waiver visitor visa.
- DummyTicketPrice, Cancellation and refund policy.
- IATA, Timatic.
- VFS Global for Greece in Kuwait, Greece checklist for tourist visa (PDF).
Related: flight reservation for visa · Schengen visa guide · guide for Filipino travellers · refund policy explained.