olybeast

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

HIDDY

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.

BA304

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

Seshman

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.

olybeast

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

potakas

Can he claim the taxes for the return flight?

HIDDY

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.

potakas

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

olybeast

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

stifle

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!

Sixth Freedom

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

HELflyer

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?

ojs555

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.

orbitmic

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...

HELflyer

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?