Hi,

I am doing two round trips from AMS to TPE in early 2018: first I am traveling with my family to TPE, then a week later I am going back to AMS for work while they stay with relatives, and then about a month afterward I am returning to pick them up. Am I violating any rules if I book a round-trip with KLM for the two outer flights (1 AMS-TPE and 4 TPE-AMS), and then use a different airline for the inner flights (2 TPE-AMS and 2 AMS-TPE)? I'm not trying to avoid Saturday-night stays or anything like that. Rather, for the inner trips I would look into cheap flights with layovers, but for the outer trips I am traveling with young children and need a direct flight.

I'm wondering whether this would cause any problems with airlines or immigration officials. Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find the exact situation asked before. Thank you!

From what you have written, you are only booking one simple return ticket with KLM (you say the other ticket is no another carrier). Therefore, there can be no issue of "nested" ticketing.

KLM cannot say or do anything about any ticket you choose to buy with any other carrier. Even if you had "nested" another TPE-AMS-TPE on KLM in there, they would first of all be unlikely to notice, and secondly, unlikely to care. But by booking with a different airline, there is absolutely no issue whatsoever.

Back to Back Ticketing - KLM
A way of cutting the cost of regular trips?
Combining two cheap tickets - is this allowed?

I think I shared this before: I use nested ticketing a lot. I once got a call from KLM that my bookings were flagged based on this behavior. So I told the lady on the phone: "Are you calling me to tell me I need to book 50% of my nested ticket on another airline? Are you sure that telling me to take 50% of my business elsewhere is helping you in any way?". She said she would talk to a supervisor, never heard back from them.

The thing is, there is very little the airline can do. You book two tickets and per ticket you accept the T&C. But you are not accepting any T&C spanning across multiple bookings. As long as you respect the T&C per ticket (like flying the legs in order), the airline cannot do anything about this.

Thank you both very much for your replies! I had the same impression, but just wanted to confirm with more experienced people.