Originally Posted by
MikeMpls
Baloney. It isn't theft and it isn't fraud. The airline can seek all the money it wants. Its customers will seek to keep their money in their own pockets .There is even one airline (with a much longer history of being profitable than Delta) whose policies explicitly allow hidden-city and back-to-back ticketing. Besides, who reads the CoC, and who cares? It's barely worth the paper it's written on.
The only risks here are your FF accounts -- you don't want to make a habit of doing this repeatedly, once or twice won't hurt -- and your credit card. In the past Delta's infamous RPU (Revenue Protection Unit) has been known to charge the fare differentials to violators' creditor cards after the fact. I've heard no reports of this happening for years, but it has been done. Such charges should be easily contested since you never authorized them.
So is it okay to lie about your age to get a senior discount? How about using your kid's reduced-fare subway card for you to travel? You are lying to the airline in an effort to get a lower fare than the one they are willing to sell you for your true itinerary. That is fraud, it is wrong, and you can use moral relativism, and dismiss the concept of freedom of contract all you want to defend it, but those are the facts.
As for Southwest allowing hidden-city ticketing, good for them. Of course, they don't operate a hub-and-spoke network, so there aren't a hell of a lot of hidden-city fares out there for them to be worried about. In fact, Southwest's fares are horribly price uncompetitive when you get away from their bread-and-butter point-to-point nonstops. And their profitability has nothing to do with allowing ticketing fraud. Rather, it has to do with a lower cost structure (and recently, with aggressive fuel hedging).
Perhaps most ironic, however, is that you would contest charges on your credit card because "you never authorized them." So I guess you don't like people taking money from YOU, but you think it's okay to steal from DL's shareholders. Interesting philosophy.