I believe Mr. Gadaí is within his rights for slapping you for confusing the two.
So I straight-up asked Air Canada’s reservations people, over the phone, about this, and they suggested I buy the return ticket and not use the second part. Or even, I can change it for some other destination later, though I have to pay the change fee (C$100) and any fare difference.
So apparently it’s no problem at all. If this is the case, one wonders why they charge twice as much for the one-way as the return.
Because flying coach doesnt make the airline any money. The rule used to be that you had to stay at your destination for more than a week to be able to book a return ticket in coach. Otherwise you were deemed a businesstraveler and were supposed to have your company fork over a fistfull of cash for the tickets.
It was a LOT cheaper to just buy two pairs of tickets in coach and throw away two of them if you were only staying overnight.
According to a relative of mine who used to fly Sweden - Brazil on weekly businesstrips.
Now I know why they say “London, England” and “Paris, France” on American news programmes. 
Probably because the one-way is an unrestricted (full fare) ticket, while the round trip is the cheapest economy ticket.
Indeed. I work in Dublin, which is about 25 miles by road from London. Last weekend, I went to visit some friends by car, and on the way stopped in Brazil and Paris*, coming back via Lebanon.
- No, not Paris, Texas – Paris, Illinois, which (like Paris, Kentucky) has a beautiful county courthouse. One of my hobbies is taking pictures of county courthouses.
Whoa, be careful about this, at least in the U.S. The difference between this scenario and the OP is that the OP is talking about not using the last leg of the trip; here elbows talks about not using the first leg of the trip.
In the U.S., if you don’t show up for the first flight and you haven’t made other arrangements, they cancel the whole ticket under the assumption you’re a No Show.
Thus speaks the voice of bitter experience.
True. And elsewhere, or at least in Europe, if bags are checked through, they still won’t (or shouldn’t) make the onward connection. Positive passenger bag matching requires them to be offloaded, which means that not only would you end up getting them goodness knows when and how, but you’ll probably also cause a delay to that flight.
A bit of a related question: I’ve heard of people living in (say) Asia wanting to get a cheap ticket to the US, but all the local travel agents are prohibitatively expensive, so they get a US-based friend to buy an Asia–>US ticket from a US travel agent for much cheaper, and then mail the ticket to them.
I heard that this used to work, but nowadays airlines flat out refuse to honor tickets purchased this way. True?
I’ve been in Dublin, OH too. Went to some pizza joint there. I prefer my Dublin.
I grew up in Cleveland, OH, and had family (among many other places) in Athens, OH (college towns in the US often have classical names like “Athens” or “Syracuse”). Once, I told a friend that I’d be out of town for the weekend, since I was going to Athens. His reply? “You’re going to Rome?”
Besides the point others made that you might let some poor person on standby get on, they’d probably try to charge you for the one-way fare if you did. So it’s not a good idea.
15 years ago, during the Saturday night stayover restrictions, lots of people who went to plants Mon - Friday did the Friday to Monday trick, but the airlines started looking for it. Some airline recently tried to put it back, but from what I read in the Times this annoyed so many business travelers the last time it hasn’t seemed to catch on.
One of the many reasons I like Southwest is that a round trip ticket is 2 X a one way - no gimmicks.