Why in the world would he check bags on a flight he has no intention of boarding?
Presumably you didn’t have to check any bags, since they automatically transfer them to the connecting flight.
When I got to the check-in counter, I simply told the attendant that I would be getting off at the connection point, not the ticketed destination. She simply said “no problem” and tagged my bag as such. It was surprisingly painless.
Can anyone explain what advantage it is to the airline to actually have my ass in the seat? I mean, other than stuff like throwing off weight distribution, but I assume that planning is based on checkins, not ticket sales. If I buy a round trip ticket from San Francisco to LA and back, but I decide on a whim to drive back to SF, why does the airline care? They got paid the same amount, they have one less customer to check-in/load/feed/unload, and the other passengers are slightly more comfortable (everyone knows sitting next to an empty seat is better). Where’s the downside?
The downside is that they could have charged you twice as much and still had the empty seat.
If you’re concerned about the airline possibly charging your credit card for the difference, see if you can get a once use number for on line purchases from your credit card company.
That reasoning is circular. You’re basically saying they charge you more for no reason other than that they want to. What’s to stop their competitors from stealing all the one-way customers by not doing this? There must be more to the explanation.
I did it twice last year with the same carrier with no problems, but they were US domestic flights, not international flights originating in Russia.
You were pretty lucky. Many, if not most, of the gate agents would have either refused to do that or charged you a higher fare on the spot.
I was a travel agent for 25+ years. Sure, we would make arrangements like back-to-back, hidden cities, and points beyond for our customers–but we’d also advise them that if they were caught by the airline, it’s their problem, not ours. Also, we’d have to make sure NOT to document any such arrangements in the passenger’s records because we were using different airlines’ reservations systems and if I had done that, say, on Worldspan for a Northwest Airlines customer, the entire record would have been there right in front for the ticket or gate agent to see.
Anyway…re the OP: I don’t anticipate any problem with no-showing a return flight. Happens all the time. Unless the airlines have become much more aggressive in the eight years since I left the industry, you’ll never hear from them again. I mean, unless you’re a regular, high-mileage frequent flyer, it’s probably not worth their time to even look into it.
Even if they did catch on, you could plead some lame excuse about your spaniel-dying-and-since-it-was-non-refundable-anyway-you-figured-you’d-lost-out-oh-please-forgive-me or some such.
A couple of tips regarding back-to-back ticketing:
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If you can, arrange the flights on different carriers. Ticket the first roundtrip on Delta, then the second roundtrip on United (for example). That way they’d never know.
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Don’t be an idiot like one of my clients and walk up to the airline counter and asked, “Uh, which ticket am I supposed to use–this one or this one?” (Much less likely in these days of electronic ticketing, but it has happened.)
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It’s not “illegal,” although the airlines will often use that exact word in describing back-to-back ticketing (or other such tricks). I don’t believe there is any actual law that proscribes the practice (there wasn’t when I was an agent.) IIRC, there was a case brought by an airline many years ago as a “theft of services”-type of thing, but it was dismissed for obvious reasons: Buying a ticket does not legally bind you to board an aircraft, nor even to call and cancel your flight.
Good travel agents can be pretty creative when it comes to saving you some money. And, these days, since they’re usually paid a flat fee (by you) instead of a commission from the airline (based on the price of a ticket), they’re not cutting their own throats by finding you a lower fare.
One last thing…don’t be a dick and have an agent work out an extensive itinerary for you and then say, “Thanks. I’ll go directly to the airline now and book it with them and thereby not have to pay your fee.” That’s simply assholish.
Is there ever any other reason?
Nothing, except that their competitors have done the same calculation and have also worked out they will make more money if they do the same thing.
First of all, some airline competitors do charge the same for a one-way ticket as half of a round trip ticket. Southwest, for example, I believe.
But most do not. And the reason really is, essentially, because they want to. Or to put it another way, they charge what the market will bear. The market will bear a much higher price for one way tickets than for round trip tickets. Why is that? Because round trip tickets are often bought by leisure travellers, who are very price conscious. If the price is too high, they just won’t go. On the other hand, one-way tickets are almost always bought by people who, for one reason or another, simply must travel, so they have to buy the ticket whatever the price.
It’s similar to the way airlines try to distinguish betweeen leisure and business travellers with the advance purchase and Saturday night stay requirements: They want to have reasonable fares for people who are price conscious, and high fares for people who have to travel regardless of the price.
Of course this filtering system is not perfect – far from it. But they don’t care.
Actually, over recent years it’s become much more common to be able to find reasonably-priced one-way fares. If you book ahead, the days of disproportionately huge one-way fares seem to be a thing of the past.
I just logged on to Travelocity and priced a return flight from San Diego to San Francisco for the middle of February. The results was $78 plus taxes and fees, for a total of $98. Then i cahnged it to a one-way flight, and the total was exactly half the price of the return trip.
I then went to United Airlines’ own website and tried the same thing, and got the same result. One-way ticket at half the price of a return ticket.
Of course, the relationship between a one-way ticket and a return ticket will also depend on things like what day you fly, and what time of day. I chose Wednesdays, and expressed a willingness to fly at any time. If i was booking the outward leg of my trip on a Wednesday, and the return half of my trip for a Friday evening, it could be that removing the return half would actually result in a fare that was less than half of the return fare, because Fridays are big travel days.
only if theres no competitors on that route with sane one way ticket pricing. Its years since I’ve seen the above situation, in most Australia / Asia air routes you book and pay for each leg separately even with a return, so one way is always cheaper.
In theory, there could also be demand imbalances for one-way tickets. Like maybe there are more one-way tickets bought going to the US than away.
I’m not sure this effect would be large enough to affect pricing.
Don’t want you to think I was ignoring this question, but it looks like **Princhester **and **suranyi **already nailed what I was going to say.
Do you walk into a store that has a “buy three, get one free” deal and try to argue with them when they don’t give you 25% off your total when you’re only purchasing one item?
That is likely because United is competing against Southwest on that route, and Southwest, as mentioned, basically sells one way tickets. Buying a round trip is just buying two of them. Their website is the simplest I know of as far as fares go.
However, I have also noticed that when booking flights on our on-line site at work, return flights on a different carrier for a low price are coming up a lot more frequently than they used to.
One additional piece of advice for the OP: book your return flight as far out as you can while keeping the fare. If there will be an issue (unlikely) it makes the argument of unforeseen circumstances keeping you from taking the flight more likely. You also might want to use it for some reason. When we moved from the East to California, we bought round trip tickets for this very reason. I don’t remember if I used my other leg, but my wife and kids did, and used a cheap one-way on Southwest to return and close the loop. You never know.
The last few times I flew I didn’t hear any bumping announcements. I volunteered a while back, when there was the possibility, but none of the volunteers wound up being bumped. I’d suspect that there are a lot fewer no-shows on such long international flights. Getting on a plane an hour later is one thing, having to wait 12 hours or even a day for the next flight to Moscow is quite another.
No, but if I really only want 3 am I obligated to take the free one?
Some cashiers seem to think so. They get real stressed when I buy two cases of soda and don’t take the third (free) one, for example. They don’t understand the concept of “limited storage space.”