https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190226-the-travel-tri...
They tend to tier things so business travelers will pay more, so there may be fare rules that increase the cost dramatically the closer you get to departure date, or charge more if you do not stay a certain number of days (I've heard one week as well as requiring a 'Saturday stayover')
Of course business travelers are the ones most likely to research and plan out how to get around these, so they might book overlapping tickets pointing opposite directions and interleave them. Airlines get upset about this, but they also know that if they try to crack down that these travelers will just take their (substantial) business elsewhere.
The Saturday night stay rule is alive and well in certain markets. Business travellers like to be safely back home before the weekend, and their [employer's] pockets are deeper than leisure travellers.
Especially if you are doing like a two day trip that looks like it might be business. E.g. LHR to JFK Mon to Wednesday.
You'd book from your home airport --> your destination --> Tiny Airport X, then skip the second flight, because the price would often be much cheaper that way.
Called "skiplagging": https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190226-the-travel-tri...
I booked a one way ticket on another to make it work, then was surprised when I tried to return home that I no longer had a valid ticket for the first.
Of course, they'll helpfully offer to let you buy a one-way ticket at the counter, 90 minutes before departure, at maximal pricing.
He would have gladly skipped the first 2 legs of the trip.
Let's say you want to fly from Vegas to New york, it might be cheaper to buy SFO to new york, and hop on the Vegas->Mew York leg. They essentially make this option less viable, and can price each market differently.
But it it’s just A-B and B-A and you don’t take the return flight, no one cares. (I’ve even gotten flack for notifying the airline as a courtesy…)
E.g. LAX-NRT on 3/2 on UA 32 is $966 right now. Add a return flight on 3/9 and the flight _drops_ to $893.
I'd be surprised any airline gave you flak for telling them you were missing a segment. They might try to charge you more (!).
They do indeed, including trip change fees. For myself, I luckily got an agent who was nice enough to ignore what I had told her.
https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...
https://www.jetblue.com/legal/notices-to-customers
However, this isn't a guarantee you won't get bumped. This just means that the maximum number of tickets sold to customers equals the number of seats on the plane. If the plane changes, so do the number of available seats. And not all passengers are customers. Some may be crew deadheading to another location.
More generally, it is less common for low cost carriers to overbook flights because their passengers tend to be cost-conscious vacationers who paid for the flight out of their own pocket and aren't about to forfeit the fare. Usually these passengers show up at a very high rate. So there usually isn't even a reason to want to overbook these flights.
Late last year I flew aaa-bbb-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd across Europe, all in one day, for exactly that reason. Five flights across four separate bookings/tickets. The connection at ccc was the tricky bit, not only "connecting" on a different ticket (so not really a connection), but a different airline alliance.
They design the system, you follow the rules. Unintended consequences aren't really your problem.
For the return leg, you check in online, download your boarding pass, and ignore it.
You "had a flat tyre on the way to the airport", or similar. In these situations, telling the truth doesn't help.
Full disclosure: I have a bit of a history of flying on what some call "mistake fares". Back in 2013 I flew "from Europe to Hong Kong and back", except it was routed via Australia(!) both on the inbound and the outbound. Was convinced I was going to be denied boarding at every single stop on the itinerary ...
I was also younger and fitter then :)
If you miss a flight and the airline determines you booked it (typically as a return or hidden city leg) without ever intending to fly it, they will very definitely try to make life difficult for you.
Try short-checking a bag to LON on a NYC-LON-Europe booking with AA or BA, they will refuse. They're worried you booked to Europe for a lower price but intended all along to leave in LON.
There are ways round this "rule", too. If you know what you're doing.
Similar to the first World Trade Center bombers that tried to get their deposit back on the rental truck they blew up.
"Two of these pieces bore a vehicle identification number (VIN) that the FBI traced to a rental agency in Jersey City, N.J. The man who rented the truck, Mohammed Salameh, had reported it stolen.
Seeking a refund of his $400 deposit, Salameh repeatedly returned to the Jersey City rental agency where he rented the Ryder van. Working with the rental office personnel, FBI agents arrested Salameh." [0]
So, yes, it really did happen. At least he reported it stolen first. I cannot believe that did not eliminate him as a suspect as that was such a well thought out alibi. Besides, how much was that $400 refund in comparison to the money that Osama surely must have paid him to carry out the deed.
[0]https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/1993-world-trade-ce...
Another pro tip: round-trip tickets are often cheaper than one-way tickets, even if you don't plan to return!
The "return" can be a long, long way in the future, too.
It's completely predictable, in fact I checked this claim at Google Flights before posting.
Say you want to fly from LON to NYC, next week, on OneWorld airlines, nonstop. Check the price for a one-way, then check the price when you add a return six months out.
Airlines are all about price discrimination. Leisure travellers benefit inordinately from this behavior.
Is that necessarily true? Charging business travelers more means those businesses have to get the money from somewhere, and one way to do that is to pass the cost onto their customers. So even if you don't fly, you're now paying $0.001 on your next box of cereal to subsidize leisure travelers. Or maybe not! I don't have any data.
Round-trip: $800
One-way: $2000 (or $4k for two one-ways to make up a round-trip)
I don’t know why anyone would ever book a one-way. It’s insanity.
It’s a real pain, and makes it harder to create your own open-jaw when the airline doesn’t serve all 3 cities.
What ends up happening is I book through other airlines entirely that don’t pull these shenanigans.
This is actually an interesting problem in the crypto space as well with things like remittances.
Since she hates stuff like this, I was tasked with finding a cheap tickets. For the first trip from here in Norway to the west-African country, I found that the cheapest tickets were from KLM (who flew direct from Amsterdam, so only one stop), and the round-trip ticket was indeed about $300 cheaper than a one-way ticket.
There are thousands of metropolis outside the US, hundreds in Latin America and about 20 just South of the US border in Mexico.
Persons of interest who are not Osama Bin Laden or Escobar or Chapo Guzman they are only captured because they use airports like they were regular civilians
Kaczynski lived in the woods for like 2 full decades, right? I'm not sure I get the point.
so the point is why would someone recommend that a poshSpice type of person live like a mountain man? hell, even Heisenberg couldn't live in the woods by himself before escaping back to his home to his eventual capture.
Nobody dreams of chasing a girl around the globe because she convinced some Private Equity Funds and Family Offices to finance a moonshot health bet and then couldn't face the reality that the bet would never convert and so she started lying.
The OneCoin girl for example, if she never sets foot in an airport and has cut ties with family and friends, they'll never get her.
He didn't get not captured because no one knew where Ted was. It's because they didn't know Ted was the guy doing the bad stuff.
Actually really well. Kaczyinski basically got turned in by his brother and Eric Rudolph hid for 5 years in the wilderness living off the land occasionally scavenging in dumpsters for leftovers (which is how he eventually got arrested by a rookie cop who thought he was a burglar). Rudolph subsequently wrote a book describing his extended hideout.
I doubt la Holmes would last long in this kind of life, but unlike those two she had access to huge amounts of money and the capability to stash someI think she could have pulled it off easily; she would be at greater risk from encountering a professional criminal that would pick up on her furtiveness.
don't fly. everything is recorded
pro-tip 3: book flight before federal investigation
Which helps the story that it wasn’t an escape plan because they couldn’t be that stupid, could they?