Originally Posted by
jrl22
since you just purchased this today, you can cancel the entire reservation with no penalty
then, as others have suggested, see if you can purchase ELM-DTW-MCO one way for $125 and DTW-ELM for $425
alternatively, look for connections (such as FNT or LAN or GRR) that might drive down the cost of the return flight and are still close enough to DTW where you could actually get there and fly both segments
This is the correct response. It answers the OP's question without the moralizing. If one wants to do a roundtrip hidden city trip to BBB, do this:
One-way ticket AAA-BBB-CCC and skip the BBB-CCC segment
One-way ticket BBB-AAA (not possible to hidden city the return)
If booked separately, skipping BBB-CCC does not cause the airline to cancel the return one-way flight.
You can't check luggage to BBB, except for an international trip where BBB is the arrival city for US customs.