Not catching the return flight
 

I know this has been mentioned a couple of times in places but I'm not 100% sure so I thought I'd ask.

LHR - HKG return is £685
LHR - HKG oneway is £978

Can I just book the return and not catch the return flight? (I'm flying on to JFK)

Has anyone ever done this? Do you still get the TPs and miles for the return leg?

Thanks for any answers

Regards

Oliver

Yes you can throw away the return and no tier points or miles will be given.

There must be a cheaper one way fare to HKG going about though.

You can but you won't get miles/TPs for any sectors not flown i.e. the return

You will not get the miles or TP's for the return leg. Theoretically no you cannot just not do the return leg - but if you do it once in a blue moon they probably won't hunt you down.

Yeah there are cheaper fares on Turkish airlines and others but I'd rather get TPs and miles from it. thanks for your answers, as far as once in a blue moon goes this will be the only time :)

Can he claim the taxes for the return flight?:D

Depending on dates of course there are other Oneworld options which might not only be cheaper but will get you more tier points as well.

RJ comes to £479 one way on a random check for September, you will earn tier points for two long haul flights 60TPs ;)

I see this. I like it. RJ are worth a try I suppose.

LH actually has a specific rule that if you no-show for a leg and request a tax refund, they'll reprice to the fare for your one-way journey and you'll only get your taxes back if that's less than what you paid.

Bear in mind if you book through a travel agent and no-show for one of your legs, the agent may well get an ADM for the difference in fares!

Apparently RJ are quite decent. But this is just what I hear from others though as I have not tried them myself yet.

Huh - so you're saying it's against the rules to not catch a flight you've booked? What do you suppose would be the penalty for that?

Well that's not quite how they put it, but the rules do say that you shouldn't be buying a return ticket if you only want a single.

That said, I am (almost completely!) certain that BA aren't going to track you down if you don't take the return flight if it's a one off.

However I can also (definitely) confirm that the BA systems do have routines in them to track down "unusual" activity. For example - staff who book 10 refundable tickets to help ensure standby availability and then cancel them at the last minute. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some additional tracking for people who continually buy cheaper returns only to use one bit.

All this said, it does help their overbooking figures... so remember that (possibly, and in a weird way) you're actually helping BA! Let me know how that goes down in front of the beak though. ;)

The 'penalty' is that if you miss the last part of your journey, the airline could theoretically reprice the itinerary according to what you flew and ask you to pay the difference. If you miss an early part, they more usually cancel the rest of the itinerary. This is not BA, this is all airlines, and similarly what is mentioned above as 'LH rule' about tax refund is common to all airlines.

For those interested, there has been a relatively recent legal case in Germany which says a bit more about how an actual court rules on what the airline could or could not do (of course, the case was in Germany so does not ensure another court in a different country would take a similar stance). In short, cancelling part of the itinerary was considered illegal but repricing the itinerary and asking the passenger to pay the difference (in that case up to the one way fare) was considered legal. Like others I believe that the airline would only try and do 'something' against a very repeat offender...

Over here Finnair tried to argue something like that some years back, after they had started their Tallinn operations. Back then you could often find a TLL-HEL-xxx return much cheaper than HEL-xxx, which made some people buy the ticket from TLL and then just not fly the final HEL-TLL segment.

If I recall, a Finnair rep interviewed in a newspaper tried to claim that missing part of your itinerary would be a breach of contract which they could sue in court, and a professor of contract law who was interviewed for the same article pretty much shredded that argument to pieces. I didn't hear more after that, and sooner or later things resolved to what they are today, the price difference is no longer large enough that most people would bother.

It's interesting if in some countries an airline can actually charge you extra (note that the LH example quoted earlier was simply about not getting a refund of taxes, not about having to pay the airline extra for allowing them save fuel or resell your seat).

I wonder what will be next by the same logic - figuring your connection time was longer than necessary, and therefore you should pay the price of a different flight you could have taken, instead of the ticket you did buy? :rolleyes:

What things 'are today' is that it does actually happen for airlines to penalise travel agents who make it a habit to sell return flights to people who want to fly singles. There have also been reports of frequent offenders seeing their FFP accounts desactivated in retaliation. As mentioned by ojs555, airlines do monitor no shows and they do so for a reason. Typically, they do not want to start a war on passengers who do it once in a blue moon because the commercial effect would be disastrous, and we don't necessarily have great knowledge of when they make exceptions, but apparently they do.

The example you provide (people flying TLL-HEL-x and back instead of HEL-x and back) is of course typical. You have the same with KLM (people flying ex-DUS), LH (people flying ex-Strasbourg using the bus-connection), etc. Airlines try to discourage it by (for instance) refusing to only part-check luggage unless you have an overnight stay planned (so they will refuse to only tag your bag to HEL if you have a connection to TLL, etc) and again cancelling the itinerary if people do not make the first segment. They do not start an all-out war on 'itinerary cheats' because right now it is not worth it, but in fact their legal argument should they want to looks fairly strong, and certainly strong enough to have already convinced a German court.

Thanks, that's interesting info. I don't think I'd very often find myself needing to book a single when return would be cheaper, but sometime I could be somewhere on cheap nonflexible tickets and have my employer book a different return leg should plans change mid-trip (leaving the original unused). As long as it's the company travel agent getting charged I don't care, but if they touched my FFP account I wouldn't be very happy.

Still, it's surprising to hear about the German court decision, I think a fairly strong case could be made for the opposite: that a ticket is entitlement to travel, not obligation; airlines already acknowledge by overbooking that people don't always show up, and this allows them to make extra revenue. They don't even guarantee that you will have a seat on the flight. Claiming you should pay extra for not using a service you already paid for (the unused segment) is rather steep when it actually costs them less to fly the plane with you not on it.

This takes me back to the opening of the T5 lounges and a 'similar but different' case!

A group of FT'ers decided that it would be fun to have a look at the lounges and sample their hospitality. The plan was to buy one-way tickets to, say, Manchester, to get airside, and then decide not to travel. There was NO intention to claim a refund on the ticket price - BA would have kept the money.

However, there was a strongly held minority view that this was hugely immoral behaviour and it led to quite a fight at the time. I never saw the logic myself, but there you are.

Back when tickets were made of paper, doms were priced differently, and I was younger and more clueless than now, I went to the BA ticket desk at LGW (I was working at LGW, though not for BA) to buy a one-way LGW-GLA. The very nice lady behind the counter actually told me to just buy a return and not use the second leg!

So I did!

If you want to fly MAD-LHR do you
1. pay €911
or
2. buy a return ticket and don't use the return leg
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/16507275-post8.html

It would be also interesting to see an airline take action in a situation where a passenger "says" that he arrived at the airport late - was therefore refused boarding and told that his seat had been sold to someone else and so therefore took a flight on another airline.

Would a court really say that the airline was entitled to the higher fare?

Sorry if I've missed someone else making the same point, but what is the difference between a person deliberately not taking a return leg and another person who, for whatever reason, misses their flight and doesn't even make it in time to the airport to check in, realises they're not going on their original flight and decides to make alternative arrangements themselves?

Practically, it is an empty seat on a plane, or one space that frees up so that someone on a waitlist can be accommodated, or solve an over-selling problem.

Legally, it may be a matter of intent, though I'm not a lawyer and stand to be corrected.

Personal experience of this - I have bought a one way ticket on BA and have also enquired at a travel agent about buying a return and not using the return leg and was assured by the person I spoke to, that it wasn't a problem. Given that "all calls are recorded for training and quality purposes", they surely wouldn't make that statement if it wasn't ok, even on a practical level.

It's a ^ from me for RJ

It gets even crazier! Flying RUH-LHR-MAN and return in J is cheaper than RUH-LHR return (in J). Plus there always seems to be a one-leg upgrade to F...

So: RUH-LHR-MAN in J and Dom and MAN-LHR-RUH in Dom and F

is cheaper than

RUH-LHR-RUH in J

No wonder people chance it! ;)

I don't think they would let you on at LHR if you were a no show at MAN though.