It is different.

When you buy the two separate airline tickets you are complying with the terms of each individual ticket in all cases when you fly the flights that are ticketed. Airlines have no monitoring or enforcement ability or authority over what you do with your Saturday night or between those flights. Whether you go out to dinner, sleep on a sidewalk, skip brushing your teeth, go to the dentist's office, or catch another flight to anywhere yo want at any time is not material to the contract of carriage.

Using your example, the car physically traversing Mexican soil IS the violation. Air tickets do not include contractual language disctating what you can and cannot do when you arrive after your outbound flight.

If you wish to participate in the carrier's attempts to artificially support and inflate their prices, you are welcome to do so.

I and all other smart travellers will travel freely on whichever flights and schedules I wish to until such time as some federal law mandates what any of us do upon arrival or where any of us must spend a certain number of nights.

There is a fundamental difference between breach of contract and fraud. The law views breaching a contract is not being a "wrong" in the sense of a tort or a crime. That's why the damages are simply to pay the benefit of the bargain to the non-breaching party. Thus, if you and I have a contract in which you will pay me $1,200 to buy goods that would have cost me $900 to manufacture, and you decide not to follow through with the deal, you pay me $300 in damages. It doesn't matter if you breached the contract with intent, or just through circumstances - there is no moral wrong.

Fraud, in contrast is a tort (and separately, a crime). Fraud is a moral wrong, and thus it can give rise to punitive damage awards and criminal penalties. And here is the difference. Breach of contract involves entering into an agreement you have an intent to honor, but don't end up honoring. Fraud involves inducing someone else to enter into a contract with you based on an intententional misrepresentation of fact, which they relied upon to their detriment.

Here is why I call ticketing fraud a fraud. Take hidden-city ticketing. We're not talking about a situation where you get to the hub city, find out your grandfather is ill, and decide to visit him in the hospital in the hub, missing the second segment. That would be breach of contract. This is a case where a passenger buys the ticket knowing they won't honor it - and the agency often suggests this course of action. It is the intent to mislead that makes ticketing fraud morally wrong.

Consider the following game agents often play. You have some good customers who really want upgrades, but don't want to buy a first class ticket. So you book 10 full fare, fully-refundable seats in first class using fake names. Then when all 10 no-show, your customers get upgraded to first. As for the fake bookings, either you never ticketed them (since full-fare bookings often didn't need to be ticketed until day of departure), or you ticket them and then refund them out. Now one can just say "Oh, well, the airline let those bookings be made - the agent is just being clever." But look what happened - the airline lost the opportunity to sell a product at the price it wanted to charge. The travel agent stole those seats from the airline, and pocketed the payoff from its customers in the form of service charges. And if you don't believe this happens, ask anyone who works in Revenue Management for an airline. They have been as brazen as MOUSE/MICKEY, or clever as real names.

Now as for the ability of an airline to crack down on ticketing fraud, the fact that a department store can place anti-shoplifting tags on clothing doesn't mean that stealing is no longer criminal. Yes, airlines can crack down on ticketing fraud. They spend money on employees and technology to do so. But that's a cost they shouldn't be forced to bear. And some frauds - like hidden-city ticketing, or married-segment fraud (where inventory is obtained for one O&D by booking another O&D containing that segment in which the inventory is still open) - are hard to catch if done across multiple carriers. The question is not whether you get caught, but whether you should be doing it at all.

Again, people are free to disagree with me all they want, but when you intentionally mislead another party to enter into a contract with you by stating facts (explicitly or implicitly) which are untrue, and do so to profit financially, when you have zero intention of honoring the terms of that contract - it is fraud.

First, I will take your statement as an admission that hidden-city ticketing is wrong. In that case, you cannot argue that "you are complying with the terms of each individual ticket." So I'm glad to see that you agree that hidden-city ticketing is ticketing fraud.

Second, you are not complying with the terms of the ticket when you engage in back-to-back ticketing. Your straw man claim that "Airlines have no monitoring or enforcement ability or authority over what you do with your Saturday night" is completely irrelevant. Nobody is claiming that they do. An airline doesn't care what you do with your Saturday night. They do, however, care if you are booking your tickets in a fraudulent manner.

Again, the airlines are very, VERY clear. You must not book multiplie itineraries out of order in an effort to evade fare rules like Saturday night stays. And for about the millionth time, let's look at a back-to-back itinerary.

Ticket 1, Segment 1: AAA-BBB (Tuesday)
Ticket 2, Segment 1: BBB-AAA (Thursday)

Ticket 1, Segment 2: BBB-AAA (Tuesday)
Ticket 2, Segment 2: AAA-BBB (Thursday).

This is not a nested itinerary, as the second ticket is not fully utilized before the traveler returns to the first ticket. Nor is this the straw man case where someone "takes the bus home" for one leg, resulting in asymmetric bookings. The purpose of booking the travel this way was not so that you could Go Go Greyhound. It was to avoid the fact that the airline wanted to charge you more for two mid-week itineraries on AAA-BBB than you were willing to pay, so you found a way to trick the airline into selling you two tickets for less money. Ticket 2 was booked as a BBBAAA O&D, when your true O&D was AAABBB. The proof is in the entire reason you claim for booking tickets this way - to get a lower price. So stop wrapping yourself in this Big Brother straw man.

Again, nice strawman. This has nothing to do with "what you can and cannot do when you arrive." Tickets DO include contractual language saying you cannot book itineraries designed to evade fare rules. Doing so, knowing that you are misleading the airline as to your true itinerary, as you say "IS the violation." Again, the issue here is not the question of breach, it is the question of whether you ever had any intention of honoring the contract to begin with.

Once again, your Robin Hood mentality shows its true colors. You don't like what airlines charge, so you find it within your rights to steal from them. If you don't like the price of a good or service, don't buy it. But being unhappy with a price doesn't give you the right to change the price through deceitful conduct. So don't confuse "smart" with "dishonest."

I mean, I think certain restaurants are overpriced. Does that mean I can go in, order a filet, their finest wine, dessert with a glass of incredible port, and then skip the check? Or just put what I want to pay in the bill. I mean, why should I have to support restaurants artificially high prices? I guess I could just not eat there, but that's not nearly as fun as a good old game of dine and dash, right?

OMG you are so full of it. Can you post your bar license or stop pretending to be a frigging lawyer on here?

Read the may 11 article in ny times magazine for a more realistic view and STOP trolling by calling people fraudsters on this board. I take great and personal exception to that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/ma...on-t.html?_r=2

I will eat as little of the buffet food as I please if I paid for the buffet. This is becoming a farce with our para(lized) "legal" opinions

People. I have no idea who this guy is but I hope you aren't intimidated by his insistent reference to criminal fraud and attempts to shame good shoppers inti believing they are morally and criminally reprehensible. Anyone even try to understand ticket rules and contracts? Often I am not even given fare codes by expedia when paying for tickets. So exactly what do I agree to then?

There is no point arguing with someone so obsessed about their moral highness. My god, even the pope admits to be fallible ...

I have 2 for 1 dining cards... Sometimes my wife isn't hungry. I take her along anyways. She might only eat a salad. Is that "fraud" too???

Do you REALLY want to tell everyone here that you rely on the NYT as your experts? Yes, go ahead use the NYT's expert advice... book two one-way hidden-city tickets to get around the airline cancelling the rest of your itin. That works great until you try to return home and they won't let you get on in the middle of your itin. You call that realistic? 90% of the people who read that article aren't smart enough to understand that it only works on the way out and not the way back home. I can't wait until someone tries it and gets burned.

I have travelled millions of miles and never make a secret of my ticketing intentions, often giving the airline reservation agent multiple pnr numbers to match up my travels or make changes.

Exploiting loopholes or shopping for low fares is not wrong. Nobody has been convicted of fraud for this. Ever.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0823.htm

LOL. Well, I guess about a million times still isn't enough for you to understand the concept. :D:D. What you wrote is perfectly legal - but why someone would book two AAA-BBB segments in one ticket is beyond me.

I think you mean:

Ticket 1, Segment 1: AAA-BBB (Tuesday)
Ticket 2, Segment 1: BBB-AAA (Thursday)

Ticket 1, Segment 2: BBB-AAA (Tuesday)
Ticket 2, Segment 2: AAA-BBB (Thursday).

You are so fixated on travel agents, when most of us don't use them anymore. You seem like your world view is set about 20 years ago, when travel agents could routinely do all of the evil things you list ad nauseum.

Which was also the same time frame when back-to-back ticketing became so popular because of Saturday night stay requirements.

These days (Earth to ExAAerOnDL) travel agents are increasingly less involved, increasingly less powerful, and increasingly subject to debit memos for shenanigans. Moreover, Saturday night stay requirements from most major markets are a thing of the past and one-way ticket pricing is ever more prevalent.

And I am not going to debate breach of contract versus criminal fraud with you. You have your view, and the rest of us have ours.

Ah yes, the NY Times travel section. Journalists in the travel industry are always so fair and balanced with their treatment of the industry. And even he says "Don’t lie if you get caught — travel lawyers agree that misstating your intentions could leave you facing fraud charges."

Now, that leaves the question of whether booking the hidden-city ticket, with no intention of flying that itinerary, is a misstatement in itself.

If you don't like being called a fraudster, don't engage in ticketing fraud. And why you take "great and personal exception" to what I have to say is beyond me. I mean, based on what you've said, why does my opinion matter to you at all? So get over yourself.

What if the buffet has a rule that says if you don't eat it, you pay for it (many do, to disincentivize waste). So you go pile too much onto your plate, and can't finish it. Should you: (a) pay for the waste, as the restaurant requires; or (b) take your plate into the bathroom and flush your waste down the toilet so they don't know you had excess leftovers? Obviously, you believe the latter is justifiable. I don't.

Do you really think anyone is "initimidated" by what they read on an internet board? All I'm doing is presenting a different point of view. I don't work for an airline. I don't have any skin in the game. Do I hope to educate at least one person (clearly not you) about the reality of ticketing fraud, and what it does to the airlines? Yes. So why don't you let people decide for themselves and stop being so defensive?

I guess if you don't have facts, start throwing out hyperbole.

No - you had a 2 for 1 dining card, so why would it be? Maybe your worst-conceived hypothetical yet.

The relevant example would be if you buy one salad bar plate at Sizzler, and then make a big plate of salad for you and your wife - instead of paying for two plates. In that case, yes it is fraud.

Allvest, you seriously need to learn how to read. I've said at least ten times in this string that I don't think any airline would ever go after this criminally. Or even with civil litigation. And I've given reasons for that. So stop lying about what I have said, and deal with facts.

What I have said - repeatedly - is that in my opinion one could make out a case for civil or criminal fraud if one chose to do so. Never said it would happen, never said it was likely to happen.

And if you think "wrong" is synonymous with "gets sued or prosecuted," your sense of ethics is so warped there's no point of debating with you.

Yep - typo after too many pints of Guinness on Memorial Day :)