orbitmic

But that is not what they do. They don't withdraw your FF account because you missed the return leg of a trip or a segment, they do it because you skipped return legs or final segments many many times. They do refer to both misconduct vis a vis the FF programme and vis a vis the airline (hence referring to a flying ban notice) and do so at other points in the CoC and on their website too. They consider that systematically breaching the airline's rule is a case of misconduct (indeed I never suggested fraud but they treat both in the same paragraph and didn't want to edit the text) as would be being drunk or causing an air rage incident on a plane. In many ways, I don't really see the difference between that and the rules of pretty much any club which always specify a number of things that would lead you to exclusion.

But you are not put in a different class from the one you booked. What happens is that you (by your action) "transforms" your ticket into a service that you did not purchase and the airline then has to find a way to approximate the way to charge it using its existing range of ticket options. It's a bit as though you entered a bar when the bartender has slipped out and help yourself to a 0.13 l of whisky and the bartender returns and spots you there saying that you were supposed to wait for his return to serve you but he will charge your drink as though he had served it. If they sell whisky by 0.05l servings then he will charge you 3 servings (of course as the situation is a bit more 'fluid' here he could propose to top up your glass first!). What I am unclear about is what other alternative can be proposed in practical terms. In my view certainly not offering an ad hoc pricing that would not have been available to someone wanting to book it in advance (e.g. 50% of a cheap return), etc.

brunos

I have no problems with someone taking high moral grounds and getting emotional about it.

Airlines who write commercial contracts with a customer constraining or forcing the use of some segments might be punished by gods. In some cases, gods could be courts. But the major god is the marketplace. I assume that carnarvon votes with his feet and privileges airlines offering one-way tickets at "reasonable' price, as defined above. If a sufficient number of customers adopt the same attitude, the marketplace will sanction other airlines. And that does happen in markets where LCCs compete heavily with legacy airlines. Free competition comes to the help of morality as expressed by carnarvon.
But the differentiation of what is good (or right) and what is bad (or wrong) differs across individuals. Personally, I fully understand that running an airline is a business and that their pricing structure can be complex in trying to segment markets and customers. I do not find it immoral. But I agree with carnarvon that the trend caused by competition is toward more flexible segment pricing, at least in some markets/regions.

irishguy28

Never been out of the valley.



And if it's NOT a prepaid rate - they charge you for MORE than what you "consumed" - which is similar to the the situation under discussion in this thread.

NickB

So what? It makes no difference. Whether you do it once or a thousand times, you are still not attempting to get around the rules of the FF programme.

Misconduct is defined in too vague and general terms to constitute a fair term in a consumer contract, imo.

The thing is that it is not whisky but lime cordial that you are drinking and you are being charged for whisky. If they have no fare (no price for lime cordial because they do not normally sell it), then it does not follow that they can charge whatever they like for it without telling you the amount first. If the contract does not clarify it, the answer is going to depend on the precise legal system. In some jurisdiction, a "quantum meruit" approach might be taken, in which case the most sensible thing to do would be to take the return fare in the relevant class and divide it by two when there is no oneway fare in the relevant class. In some other legal systems, you might not be able to charge, especially in professional-consumer contexts.
You could draft the contract to avoid those kind of consequences but, phrased as most contracts currently are, there is a potential problem (from the airlines' PoV), imo.

carnarvon

No, not similar.

R/t ticket is prepaid. Only comparison with hotel would be with prepaid rate.

pianoamit

For god's sake... Unless you do this serially, the airline may most probably not even notice you're doing it. About short-checking luggage, it's your luggage and your call. If a check-in agent doesn't want to do it for you, call the supervisor and remind them of this fact. A stopover fee cannot be charged for this, since a stopover has nothing to do with luggage, it is simply a layover of >24hrs. The fee that was quoted further upthread was most probably an 'admin fee' for having to retrieve the luggage from the baggage system (it had already been through-checked).

orbitmic

The part I'm not clear about (which is a genuine question as I'm sure you have a good reason to but I just don't see it intuitively) is why you say that the airline can only include misconduct with regards to the programme itself (accrual, use, etc) and not about severely or repeately breaching the rules of the mother airline. If by that you only mean the second point (that misconduct in the specific example that I provided is defined too broadly) then I agree, but if it is a general point I don't really see it (again, not assuming you don't have a point but just not getting it).

Well it is not really lime cordial either, as this would suggest that it has nothing to do with it (while the no1 similarity is that you wanted to fly a single from A to B and that is what you flew) but let us say rather that the beverage list includes Bloody Mary and you decide that you will help yourself to a Virgin Mary which is not on the menu. It doesn't really make sense to me that one could impose to the bar to sell Virgin Mary if for reasons that belong to them they decided not to sell it. Ultimately, as brunos mentions, it may be entirely stupid to choose not to allow one way fares in Y and say that one way fares must be booked into W and C, and it makes perfect sense that airlines which do that will shoot themselves in the foot commercially and get what they deserve custom-wise, but is there a good reason to suggest that they should legally be obliged to sell/price such one way tickets in Y? There are cases in which companies cannot refuse to serve something to customers, but AFAIK it typically involves discrimination based on the nature of the customer or bulk pricing when customer protection specifically allows the de-bulking of lots rather than refusal to sell specific products (to all customers) that the company could produce.

NickB

There are two issues. An unfair term is a term which is contrary to good faith and reflective of the imbalance of powers between the professional and the consumer.
A clause by which you attempt to use your powers under a contract to induce compliance with the terms of another contract strike me as an excellent candidate for an unfair term: if there has been a breach of a contract, you should use the appropriate remedies available for that breach, not try to get around the issue by having recourse to another contract.

The second issue is one of breadth and also lack of clarity of the clause: BA are close to saying: if you have ever done anything at any point in your life with British Airways that we regard as in some way reprehensible or wrong, then we can cancel your membership. I do not think that such a clause is likely to survive an unfairness test: it is far too broad and, moreover, far too unclear.



No, but if your contract says: you will be charged the appropriate fare for the trip actually taken and the trip that you have actually taken is a oneway in Y (because you threw away the second half of your Y ticket) and the airline has no oneway in Y, I would have thought that they cannot charge you arbitrarily the fare applicable for a higher class just because they do not sell oneway Y anymore than they could charge you for the price for the higher drink (whisky) when what you have drunk as a glass of lime cordial+water.

While I disagree that lime cordial is not an appropriate comparison (it is a drink just as much as whisky), I am happy to go with your Virgin/Bloody Mary analogy (or bottle of Tesco value red wine versus a bottle of Romanée-Conti if you prefer). The question is not whether the restaurant should be forced to sell Tesco value wine (clearly they are not) but whether, having de facto sold it to you, whether they should be free to to charge you the price for a Romanée-Conti for it. The terms of the contract are that you are free to fly only oneway if you want but you will then be charged the price for the oneway. They don't normally have a oneway (the restaurant does not normally sell Tesco Value Red): can they charge the price for another class of higher value (another wine of higher value)?

The answer to the problem, from a contractual perspective, is that you draft your contract differently to make clear that you will be charged for the lowest applicable fare in your class or travel or, if unavailable, the next lowest available fare even if in a higher class.
We would then have to determine whether this is a fair term or not, which I am not entirely sure it would be.
But, frankly, this is all rather theoretical, imo, as I can't see AF (or other airlines for that matter) actively seeking actual payment of the oneway fare from the passenger in throwaway situations.

jsfr

If you do it a thousand times, it means you have bought a thousand tickets... does an airline want to chase away a client who buys thousands lf tickets?

I've done it lots of times, and spend an average of €50k per year on airline tickets. Is an airline going to really want to chase me away to another airline?

The truth is that if an airline really cracks down and implements "punishment" on their regular clients, well, said airline won't have many more clients in our niche who simply are not allowed by our employers to purchase more expensive one-ways.

At the end of the day they are not losing money because their revenue management judged that it was good deal to sell me the ticket at the time I bought it. They force us to buy one ways without a competitive one-way product - we'll just spend our money elsewhere...

I suspect we are also a minority, the majority of less frequent travellers probably justify the one-way fare structure. This is simply a method to accomodate (get money from) both types of traveller...

Brobbel

Yes.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...-vs-497-a.html

irishguy28

Yes.

http://www.businesstraveller.com/ask...points-penalty

matthilein

Ok, to give you an update on the shortchecking situation with KLM (see above posts 49-58) -- it did work in my case. I had a return flight IAD-AMS-TXL, and needed to fly only IAD-AMS. The layover in AMS would have been less than two hours. Simply told the check in person at IAD that I needed to retrieve my luggage in AMS to leave it there -- voila, no problem, no discussion. Luggage only checked through to AMS and ready to be picked up. So this seems to be some form of discretionary decision by the relevant agent. I would also think that the airline should not have a say in this; after all it's my luggage and I can do with it whatever I want. But, as Irishguy said, it's probably something you can't rely on (even though my example shows that it's possible). Hope this helps.

Calchas

You accept without objection (I presume) other restrictions on access to your belongings during the transit (e.g., hold baggage cannot be accessed by passengers during the flight). The airline quoted you a price to carry you and your luggage from A to B with whatever conditions they put in place. Dropping your luggage off at intermediate point C was not part of the deal!

matthilein

Hah! I am not entering this debate... All I am saying is that there are plenty of other genuine reasons why luggage or part of the luggage need not be checked through, for instance, if meeting someone atthe layover airport. It's clearly possible under the airline's own guidelines (for instance with a layover 12 hours or longer) so why shouldn't this be allowed otherwise? It certainly does not mean that the flier will always skip the last leg.

JVPhoto

So after grazing through this thread I have come up with...what's the worst that can happen? That I "might" get the fare difference charged to my credit card.

Right now r/t AMS-FRA is 120euros for my date and o/w is 189euros. I have never flown KLM before, mostly likely never will again (no FF or historical data).

So if I book the round trip and don't show up I'll be saving 70euros. However, if they DID decide to charge me the fare difference what do they base the fare off of? Could it end up being the day of fare or something like that where it may end up costing me 250 euros instead?