It seems that my wife will not be flying home with me from our vacation in the US. Before you get worried she will be back a week later. We've got a ORD-EWR-OSL routing and I wonder what will happen? We've got cheap economy tickets and I've already asked CO about changes or refunds but was told that is not possible. It's our own stupid faults for getting non-changeable tickets so that is not the issue.

The question is rather will she be hit with any fees or "punishments" for not using the return part of our trip? She will obviously have to purchase another one-way ticket to get back home, but will that be it? Both tickets are on the same booking code/confirmation code.

What will happen to her seat on the flight I will be taking? As the seat is still paid for I would say that it would be fair that I get a free middle seat, but I suppose it could be argued both ways?

Currently we don't know if she will get that extra week off she wants so I'm currently just gathering information about our options.

Cobos

Split the reservation online into two seperate reservations.

Call once you have flown the outbound portion of the flight and see what the change fee is, most likely it is $250, (cheaper than a new ticket).

A non-changeable ticket is very rare on CO.

I would double check this information. It's possible it's changeable for a fee, but the rep didn't see any available space in that bucket.

Or perhaps the rep blew you off because she didn't know how to process the change, so the quickest way to get you off the phone and preserve her call times was to say it's not possible.

Anyhow, I would get a couple more opinions on this, because it's usually doable for a fee.

As for getting the second seat, that's not allowed. Tickets are not transferrable, and that's very clear in the rules.

If you want to preserve the seat as long as possible and you're sure the ticket is a loss, have your wife come to the airport and check in with you. They'll offload her at the last minute when she doesn't board, and hopefully there will be no additional standbys to take her seat.

Finally it's worth pointing out that if you do need to purchase a new ticket, a new RT is likely cheaper than a one-way. Just buy a RT with a throwaway return a few weeks later. In fact, since the new return will be a throwaway, you can buy it for a cheaper market.

Throwaway ticketing is illegal per the CoC (condition of carriage). At least if you throw away the return - do not have your FF number in the system.

If your wife has time, have her accompany you to the airport and also check-in. Depending on your travel time, she might score VDB, at which time she can try negotiating a later departure and then repeat the process.

As for OW ticket home, CO will not chase down an occasional throwaway. If this concerns you at all, try Priceline for OW ticket home. More competitive markets might have lower prices, so you can Priceline OW ticket to AMS and then a LCC connection home (although the latter may not be cheap if you have lots of baggage).

Thanks for the tips. I'll contact Continental again tomorrow, but I did speak with one of their Norwegian speaking reps that seemed rather knowledgable. Regardless I've checked my booking online and found out my fare class on the return is W. This gets a bit more complicated as I will be doing another trip from my starting point into Chicago the day I travel home so the original idea was leaving the wife there and I just do the trip to ORD alone.

She would then eventually leave SFO actually for OSL, but I suppose she could always do SFO-ORD the day she leaves and use a changed date original ticket.

Any way thanks for all the help, listening to myself I do see this looks pretty crazy, but what can I say... it wasn't my idea :-D

Cobos

EDIT: When I try pressing the obvious "Change Flight" button on the Continental website I get this error message: "Continental.com is unable to initiate your flight change request at this time. Please contact Continental Reservations at 1-800-525-0280 to make changes to this Itinerary."

If you call 1-800-300-1547 and say that you got an error message on CO.com and ask to be transferred to the tech desk you may get better results. IME the tech agents are pretty darn good at this sort of thing.

Ticket is most likely changeable but for a fee and conditional on inventory being available on the new flight date in the same booking class (or paying the difference) and within the ticket's validity dates. This may or may not be more expensive than throwing away her return and buying a new one-way ticket.

Split the reservations before the flight to give yourself the flexibility to change her return.