'Exchanging' or cancelling last segment of a flight
 

Dear All,

I have a question with regards to a booking which I have travelled and how this experience would maybe help me in the future.

For your understanding, I have booked a flight MXP-NRT-MXP via DUS on LH/EW/NH.

I am based out of MUC however, MUC flights to TYO/NRT seem to be very highly priced on Star Alliance Carriers. The price difference was about 500 Euros and I ended up paying 450 Euros for the combination of EW (MXP-DUS) and NH (DUS-NRT) plus 50 Euros on EasyJet from MUC to MXP and 70 Euros on LH from DUS to MUC.

So here's my questions on what has happened. As you can see from my itinerary, I wanted to end up in MUC instead of MXP. Therefore, I bought a LH ticket for DUS-MUC, which was scheduled to leave after 2,5hours my arrive at DUS from NRT.

At check-in at NRT, I have asked the agent if my luggage can be tagged to MUC instead of MXP, hence basically throwing away my DUS-MXP flight.

This was easily done and I was surprised that things went so smoothly.

My question to you guys is, is this a common solution?
The MXP-DUS-NRT/NRT-DUS-MXP was on one ticket.

Thanks for your feedback!

It's called hidden-city ticketing and it is very common. You should do a search on it and you'll get hundreds of threads about it. Usually the problem is short-checking your bags to the intended (intermediate) destination, but I see it worked for you.

The short answer on this practise is that, if you do it repeatedly, the airline may come after you and try to bill you for the fare difference, or close your M&M account. But it might not. We don't really know. AA recently did this to one of their flyers. If you do this every once in a while, the consensus is that the airlines can't/won't do much about it. If you did this through a travel agent, airlines will often come after the agent for the fare difference.