Midships

Addressing the common law associated with railway travel:

If a passenger misuses his ticket by breaking the conditions on which it was issued to him, he breaks his contract and may be liable to pay the fare or part of it over again.

Whilst most ticket types permit the passenger to stop his journey at a station short of that shown on his ticket, the Train Company may in some cases at certain times charge a higher fare for the shorter journey. In those cases, the passenger must pay the appropriate fare for the journey actually made. The cases for this are, GN Ry v Winder [1892] 2 Q.B. 595; GN Ry v Palmer [1895] 1 Q.B. 862. I can't see that either of these cases have been changed by subsequent courts, in the absence of which there is no reason to believe that they are not still binding precedent.

At common law a passenger has no right to break his journey at an intermediate station and resume it later. See Ashton v L & Y Ry [1904] 2 K.B. 313; Bastaple v Metcalfe [1906] 2 K.B. 288.

If a passenger knowingly does takes advantage in this manner, he or she may be guilty of a criminal offence under s.11 of the Fraud Act 2006, an offence that carries a maximum sentence of five yeas.

I see a few posters saying that this is a breach of this, that or the other consumer protection legislation. For my part I know of no judicial interpretation of this protective legislation that would cover this. If there are any that could point me to such cases, I'd certainly be interested to read them.

Now the forgoing all refers to common law, clearly BA is a liberty to modify the common law with their T&Cs and I am really not that interested in sitting down and reading these.

I would however make two points, the first is that if you have a return ticket from A to C via B, and you stop at B, there is a high risk you will be asked to pay for a return ticket from A to B, before you can board at B to go back to A.

The second point is from my days in Cyprus. Cyprus Airways used to fly on a very low fare to MAN. BA did not. So BA matched the the Cyprus Airways fare, connecting through LHR. Many of us, including me, used to jump off at LHR as the LCA - LHR - MAN fare was a lot cheaper than the LCA - LHR fare.

Then on one occasion, one of my colleagues was intercepted by the station manager at LCA, and advised that BA would decline to sell him any tickets at all if he continued the practice. In those day if you flew BA from LCA to JFK via LHR Club the whole way, you got upgraded to Concord for one leg. None of us wanted to lose that perk, so we stopped playing the game. My advice, if any one is interested, its a dangerous game, leave it to others to play until such time as you have binding judicial authority that has considered the BA T&Cs in its judgement, and that says it is fine to do it. (Though if that time is ever reached, I suspect that BA will simply change their T&Cs)