I am curious to know your thoughts on this situation. A friend of mine recently purchased a ticket to LAX departing from PHL. He has one connection so the flight is PHL->EWR->LAX. Apparently, on the day of departure he will be in the vicinity of EWR. He was tempted to just make up an excuse for missing the original flight and meet the rest of the party at PHL. I am wondering if this is something which can be done, if so it must be a good enough excuse. What are your thoughts on this situation?

His whole itinerary will be canceled if he misses the first segment.

If he simply shows up at EWR (And the itinerary was not yet canceled), he will likely have to pay the fare difference between PHL-LAX and EWR-LAX.

Thank you. I figured so much, but, I just wanted to make sure this could not occur. Sometimes, you can come across a nice customer service rep or gate agent which can change it for you, but without that you would have to pay.

You can hope for an irop.

A couple years ago I was flying DL PHL-JFK-SEA. I was on a southbound train to Philly, still north of Trenton, when I decided to pull up flight status. My PHL-JFK was delayed to the point that I would miss my connection. I called DL, they saw the irop, I told them I could find my own way to JFK, they deleted the first flight, I got off the train at Trenton, picked up a northbound train, and still made my flight at JFK.

With EWR and a tight connection this would be even easier, I suppose. But you would have to get a CO agent to delete the PHL-EWR flight from the reservation before you miss it.

It's all YMMV.

Search "flat tire" for some other examples on the forum.

I wouldn't necessarily assume a parallel DL experience would apply to CO. I've found DL to be much more reasonable in IRROPS than CO.

CO has given be significant resistance on IRROPS matters that other carriers have handled without an issue.

I had ERI-CLE-MCI-CLE-ERI booked at $200 instead of CLE-MCI-CLE for $700 the day before the flight.

Before I drove the 90 minutes to ERI I saw the flight was delayed so I called CO and said I would just drive to CLE and park my car there to make the MCI flight and they gladly deleted both ERI segments.

I have had CO do exactly this for me twice without so much as a blink of an eyelid. Two specific examples:

- Booked on CO LHR-EWR, and on a separate ticket EWR-ORD-EWR 2 days later. Badly affected by a snowstorm in LHR, CO happily rebooked me on UA direct LHR-ORD, and deleted the EWR-ORD segment of the other ticket. The agent understood exactly why I was asking to do this and had the change made in a few minutes.

- Similar to CaptainMiles' example above, I had booked a PHL-EWR-XXX flight because it was dramatically cheaper than EWR-XXX - was planning to hop on the train down to PHL to take the flight. Bad weather in EWR, PHL flights delayed extensively, CO proactively offered either a rebook on US direct from PHL or to delete the PHL-EWR segment and start from EWR. I went for the second option.

But yes, CO is horrific at IRROPS because one poster on this board says so

CO once deleted a MFE-IAH flight from an itinerary for me because I wanted to take the bus across Texas and see what was there. (On a deep-discount ticket.)

I think the agent decided I was dangerously insane and should be humored to avoid disaster :-)

Mind you, I had been doing that route a lot so it was probably obvious from my history that I wasn't trying to scam the system which may have helped.

I'm glad you had good experiences with CO and IRROPS. If CO were COnsistent about their IRROPS handling, they wouldn't have such a mixed reputation for (mis)handling them.

And while I know it's been tradition on this board for years to attack anyone who dares challenge anything CO does, it's worth pointing out that I'm not the only poster with CO IRROPS issues. Look at any issue thread on a bad weather day, and there are always posts of Star Alliance reaccommodation rules being violated, by both new and established posters.

It is a shame that as a COmmunity we can't "work together" to attempt to address it. There are times that CO gets it right, and there are other times when they don't. But they get it wrong enough that it's still a problem.

You're missing the point. CO aren't automatically worse than other airlines when it comes to IRROPS because you say so. In fact, your experiences are usually so vastly different to the majority (note: not all) of those posted here that at some point you really should consider whether your diatribes are actually adding confusion to members of this community ^

I will, yet again, respectfully disagree with your position.

While you're probably right that the "majority" would agree or disagree, what good is the "majority" if there is no fair selection? I would say that there is significant selection bias within this COmmunity -- specifically because of years of COnducting this place like a CO love fest, if you will. This has created an often aggressive, if not hostile, attitude by select members of the COmmunity against those who did not portray CO favorably.

So much so that many of those who would be likely to validate a negative point regarding CO have been driven off from intimidation by the COol-Aid COntingent.

I often receive PMs saying such from random members I'd never met, and every time I attend any sort of FT type gathering, I get a handful of thanks for standing up against the so-called "majority" on the CO board.

So to your point, I would tend to agree that it's possible that the "majority" who post on this board may not agree with me. But the "majority" of customers or the "majority" of those who view this board may sing a different tune.