Scandinavian traveler

Rudi Seiberlich

Nothing will happen, as you are "allowed" to miss your flight or? There has been court cases in Europe, airline lost in each case. If you are a frequent mileage partner with just that airline, the only risk is that they may cancel your miles if they think you have deliberately booked a round-trip but never intended to use it.
It's an old fashioned tariff situation of Legacy Airlines but will sooner or later disappear. I see already many Legacy Airline adopting to new one way fare structures making this a thing of the past. But still there are some big US and European carriers trying to stick to such ludicrous pricing rules

bisonrav

Be careful what you wish for. These "ludicrous pricing rules" allow carriers to compete on particular routes without screwing their margins elsewhere, and as a beneficial side effect create lower fares for those of us prepared to start from a remote airport.

KARFA

Welcome to FT Rudi Seiberlich!

I think the only case I am aware of is the LH one, discussed in this thread Interesting Court Decision In Germany - Passenger does not need to fly last leg

From the comments of NickB (who tends to understand this stuff well) in post 20 the ruling doesn't seem to be that you are or are not allowed to miss the last leg per se - you have always been able to miss it and an airline can't forcible put you on the flight at the end of the day. Instead the issue for LH seemed to be that it was not clear to the passenger when he booked what the cost would be if he did miss it so there was no transparency in terms of what the re-pricing would be. As you say though, to some extend it is fairly academic as there aren't too many known cases of airlines trying to re-price anyway.

corporate-wage-slave

Welcome to Flyertalk and welcome to the BA board Rudi Seiberlich, it's good to see you here. I hope we will see more of you.

The cases in Germany, Italy and more recently Spain have superficially similar (but actually different) back stories to the scenario here. There are a heap of different practices in the mix, such as Hidden City pricing, and Nesting tickets. However this is different - when BA sells you a return ticket, they know full well a chunk of passengers will not make the return. In fact in Big Data terms they will know you will miss the return flight before you do! There are no consequences, but as mentioned it does make sense to book a return which just may be useful, or failing that on a service which is likely to be radically changed by the time of departure, since that may give other options.

Note that Iberia do sell single tickets at more reasonable rates, however some of them they don't credit very well since they are affectively Level codeshares. You will get the Avios (via IB+) but the frequent flyer status credit can't transfer. Ditto Aer Lingus.

salut0

UKtravelbear

In the scheme of things the number of flights that qualify for EU261 is pretty small. And a long delay due to weather isn't going to get you any compo even on BA.

So make flight decisions based on things like price, schedule and seat.

TBH I'm not going to put myself into an awful CW seat with all the downsides of that just on the possibility of some EU261 if a flight is delayed when I can sit in and sleep in a better AA seat.


As to consequences, there was an article on OMAAT in the past week that said UA had issued a memo to staff asking them to report incidents of hidden city ticketing so the egregious passengers who do this a lot can be identified and warned by head office. They aren't wanting gate staff to challenge passengers though. So it is on the radar of airlines.

Blueboys999

But the vast majority of passengers travel in Economy where there is no significant difference in terms of price, schedule and seat. In those circumstances and having endured a 48 hour 2 overnight delay on AA myself a couple of years ago, I now always opt for BA on Eastbound flights.

salut0

jpp42

Blueboys999

The majority of Economy passengers don't take note of such fine distinctions (and probably aren't even aware of them) and by no means all of those that do would agree with your analysis which is of course completely valid as far as your individual preference are concerned. Schedule and, above all, price are by far the primary factors for Economy cabin travellers.

Blueboys999

corporate-wage-slave

If there is a flight cancellation they must refund the ticket. Ditto a retiming greater than 5 hours. On that route it's a long shot, but AA is perhaps more likely than BA generally. But BA do also cancel services, usually one of the early afternoon services. Overall AA is generally a good one for cancelling - or reissuing flight numbers with slightly different times - but on that particular route they tend to be more cautious.

GeezerCouple

Very interesting strategy.

But how would they price that refund, given that the RT is *less* than the one-way?

<joke alert> Make the passenger pay the difference because they airline changed and "made it impossible/of no use" (as though they were billing if they "caught" someone doing this without any schedule change...just a no-show on the return, IF they bothered to do that)?
Quite a nice "refund"

GC