Originally Posted by
yamaka
No offense taken, well except maybe for the "random" part since I don't think of my own ethical perspective as random; I think of it as the outcome of more years than I wish to living and learning.
People live by their own ethics; others get to see the way they live, and decide if it is a way they would choose to emulate or not. If I take someone up on a contract I do my best to adhere to it, and expect them to do the same. It matters not to me if it is my neighbor, a friend, the government or a business. For others, I guess it does. They have an attitude I choose not to emulate.
By the way, I don't think throwing away the ticket to EWR is illegal, but it does violate the contract of carriage. People agree to all sorts of things in contracts that don't make sense. If you don't want to fly to Newark, don't buy a ticket to do so, or find an airline that doesn't prohibit hidden city ticketing in its contract.
I understand. I did not mean that you yourself randomly came to this position. I just meant that from my pov it's random. If that makes sense.
Personally I always find it to be ridiculous when a business or an entire industry offers pricing that is convenient to them but otherwise really irrational especially to the consumer and then asks the consumer to politely just play along. Especially when they themselves are abstaining from the cost of fixing compliance or rationalizing the prices.
I briefly worked for an airline some years back and had this issue explained to me for a few price structures. In some instances the reasoning made sense. In others it was just arbitrary and bizarre. But the constant was the airline's awareness that it was a delicate issue to manage as it was accepted that if any publicity came about from them trying to force people to pay more for taking half a flight they would always look like the bad guys. And rightly so, imho.
Personally I think hidden city ticketing should be abused by everyone as much as possible until the need to abuse it goes away. If the airline doesn't like it's up to them to do something about it.