Originally Posted by
tom911
Even there you have some risk - they may not let you board at IST if they see the connection won't work and you're not meeting the minimum connecting time for your onward flight. What if the flights to the U.S. are all oversold for several days in a row, or there's an earlier mechanical giving those passenger priority ahead of you for open seats? I would just never fly this itinerary and wing it along the way hoping everything works out in the end.
I don't have an IST-AMS leg in my itinerary. I would have to book my own positioning flight if I did decide to go, in which case they would have no reason to bar my journey to AMS. I could address the other risks by booking a one way award ticket from AMS and canceling it if everything works out. It's far from ideal but it's not as reckless as you make it. The risk of committing a sunk cost fallacy, however, is very real.
Originally Posted by
tom911
My bigger concern is still that you're on a consolidator ticket which does not have a legal connection now. Will the airline afford you the same courtesy they extend to passengers paying the published fare on their website, or will they send you back to your travel agent who should never have issued the ticket with the new routing to begin with?
Ah, the million dollar question.