required to return via same route
 

I have a CX ticket booked in H and i'm AAdvantage Plat. I flew from LAX-HKG-PEK a month ago. I now need to return to Los Angeles but instead of leaving from Beijing i will be leaving from Shanghai. Since CX does not fly from Shanghai I have booked a ticket with China Eastern. The customer service lady at CX told me that she needs to have permission from her office in America to allow me to return home with only flying on the HKG-LAX segment. If not she said I would need to return using the original route (PEK-HKG-LAX) for the ticket to be good.

Does anyone know what the exact policy is? What should I expect when the CX agent calls me with a decision? Any information is greatly appreciated.

This is the policy of most airlines in the world for ages for discount tickets. For any itienerary, if you miss a leg in the middle, the rest of the itinerary gets cancelled.

You bought a LAX-PEK roundtrip, you need to fly back from PEK unless you change the ticket. Always been like that. Same everywhere.

She was 100% correct.

It is much cheaper to buy a SHA-PEK ticket than a SHA-HKG one. Are you so tight on time that you can't route that way?

thank you flyertalk for the quick info. yes i am short on time...I guess i will have to change my SHA-HKG ticket around.

Thanks!

I had the misfortune of having a ticket cancelled because I had missed a leg. I was flying this JFK-SFO(stopover)-HKG-ORD-BDL on UA. So on the SFO-HKG sector, I wanted to return to HK earlier and take SQ instead. So when I was in HK, I checked my itineries online, and found that my itinery was gone (and so was the upgrade). When I call UA, they told me that the entire ticket was cancelled, and cannot be refunded. Neither can I pay a fee to recover that. Even though I learnt my lesson, that was a huge waste of money (HKD10000+ for a now one-way ticket) So never ever skip a leg on a multi-sector journey.

It depends on where you purchased the ticket from. If thru a TA, then CX needs to refer to the TA's ticketing agreement with CX on that particular routing. There is no set policy, but normally CX LAX-PEK/SHA-LAX via HKG is common rated, and only a small reissue fee will be charged by CX to reissue the ticket.

And you might not even have to get your SHA-HKG seperately!