So I’m fancying going to Europe this Spring, and while I had hoped originally to fly into either Amsterdam or Brussels, I see on travelocity, for example, that tickets to London are easily $150 less expensive round-trip. So I was thinking I would just fly to London and catch a cheap puddle-jumper from there to the continent…
But then, looking over the details of a desirable London flight, I see that it in fact has a three hour stop-over connection in Amsterdam! So then I started to think, why can’t I just buy the London tickets, and bail out at the stop-over in Amsterdam anyway? Thus saving myself a few hundred bucks AND getting to my desired destination faster, and it’s hardly like I’m cheating them.
The fine print at Travelocity has some voodoo about your seat being up for grabs if you “fail to check in for any segment of your trip”-- obviously they couldn’t ding me for “missing” my flight onward to London, but it sounds like they could certainly cause me trouble for not checking into London on the return trip, and cancel my seats on the outbound from Amsterdam leg. If I showed up at the airport in A’dam before my London trip was scheduled to depart, could I get away with it (“we decided to stay on the continent longer than we had expected”), or would they find some way to screw with us anyway? Am I foolishly messing with the Man? Is this a no-brainer? Would they blink? I have to assume someone else has noticed this disparity before and tried to capitalize on it…