Stopover Question: beat the system
 

I have a question regarding buying one way tickets or doing a stopover with a dummy flight back. I have to fly from Narita to Taipei to Hong Kong all on one way flights. According to the Cathay website, this would cost me over $1500 per person. However, if I create a dummy flight from HKG back to NRT, the price drops to only ~$500. This is on an Economy Saver L fare. My question is whether there will be any issues if I am a no show on that last flight back to Japan. If its no problem, do I still get the extra miles? TIA

Pricing one-ways higher than round trips is a common, decades-old practice. The conditions on the two fares are likely to be different, with the cheap round-trip fare being more restrictive regarding changes/refunds and also probably earning fewer miles. (The one way fare is probably NOT an L fare.)

If you can live with the restrictions, go ahead and save the money. You are not supposed to throw away the return half, but they can't actually force you to fly. No, you cannot get miles for flights you aren't taking.

You are right, the one way trips force you to buy a higher class, which I find rather odd. Not sure why international airlines like to punish one way flyers. Anywhoo, thanks for the advice, I didn't want any unexpected fees to show up

Because they can -- at least when there isn't any low-cost carrier competition on that particular route. Traditionally, it's been the LCCs that have disrupted the round-trip requirements on the cheapest fares.

Many frequent flyer programs allow one-way award bookings, sometimes that's a good option.

I've done quite a few one-way bookings as round trips bookings. What I do is is very simple.

I book A-B-A and let the return to a far away date as possible allowed by the ticket. Then when I need to fly, I change the return date to the time I want because you never know if might do that one-way return.

I do this even for restrictive round trip fares; I book the outbound of a second ticket to be the inbound of the first trip and vice versa.

yes, but with Cathay's useless award reservation system, everything is usually "full"