Is this back to back ticketing or throwaway ticketing?

Upvote:3

There's no problem at all with this. You're booking, and taking, all your flights. You're using all your returns, the airline is not going to care.

No links or references I'm afraid, but I've done basically this without the cruises. When I relocated from the UK to Asia for work I ended up, for various reasons with a one-way ticket to the back to the UK. To get back to Asia I bought a very long term return (six months) and used the first leg for my immediate travel back and the second later in the year for a vacation. I had to do this a couple of times until I managed to arrange a way to get back to Asia one-way. During that six month period I traveled on the same airline and they didn't care that I had some open pending return ticket. There was no question that I'd 'thrown it away' as the date was still in the future. Tickets are only cancelled after you don't show up on the date in the ticket.

Of course, if you're paranoid, just book the B <-> H return with a different airline. Even if you don't they're really not going to care.

In fact, if you want to take both cruises it's an entirely sensible strategy, and probably the cheapest way to do it. I'd be surprised if a lot of people didn't do exactly this.

However, if you only really want one cruise you could book the returns and discard the return flights -- you normally get away with this if you don't do it to often and discarding one return shouldn't invalidate the other flight as long as they were booked as different transactions. Alternatively you might persuade an airline that the pair of flights H -> I -> O and B -> H counts as an open jaw return and gets the return discount. This probably wouldn't work if B is in the US, but if B was international I could see it working.

Finally, while the airline will not care, customs in various places may notice the odd pattern and may decide that it's good reason to pull you over for extra screening. They may not, it depends on a lot of things but I thought I'd mention it.

Edited to add: If you need more convincing consider this, someone might go on a six month holiday somewhere. But in the middle may need to return for a while for some urgent matter (or Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever) at home. They'd end up with the same pattern of flights as you, and this isn't really going to be that uncommon. So you're not doing anything that 'odd' even if it feels like it.

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