Not flying return portion of RT award ticket
 

I've booked myself on a RT SAN - BGR flight in September. My wife will fly back to from BGR to SAN with me, but will be arriving separately. I tried to get her a OW award ticket, but it was going to be 60k miles because the BGR - SAN segment is in the 30k bracket and of course US doesn't do OW awards. My entire RT ticket was 45k (20k outbound + 30k return - 5k dividend miles credit card), so paying 33% more for half the flying seemed pretty poor to me (not to mention, she only has 43k miles, so it's impossible).


Can I book her a RT ticket BGR - SAN, with the first leg being BGR -> SAN, and then she simply doesn't fly the second leg? I can get one of those for 42.5k. I can't see the harm in doing so, but then again I don't understand the logic whereby a return ticket costs 33% more than one of its legs, so I might be missing something. Thanks!

Why not book the return in January or February, when you can get it for 12,500 miles for that leg? If you're not using the return, might as well book the cheapest segment you can. Then, if you're spending 30k outbound and 12.5k return, minus 5k DM miles credit card, that's only 37.5k.

Thanks, that's exactly what I did, book a 12.5k return. I assume US won't be too sore she doesn't fly the return. We'll let them know ahead of time.

You don't need to, it won't make a difference for US Air. Even if you call them to inform them, no action will be taken.

That's really interesting. Just out of curiosity, why wouldn't they take advantage of those empty seats and try to sell them again? I suppose they can use them for standby passengers.

Yes, if you call, they will cancel your seat on that flight and they would open up that seat for sale again. On behalf of a traveler who might want to use that award seat later on, I'll say thanks now.

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I would call to cancel- you never know, perhaps a nice ticket agent would redeposit the miles for the return. (0.0001% chance of that happening, but you never know.)

They won't cancel it as it's not cancelable once itinerary starts. A supervisor could maybe override this rule but I doubt they will lose time for that.

Revenue management people already factor no show rate by overselling the flights. One or two seats won't make a difference...