Under what circumstances can one hope to get to use their return flight without using the forward flight?

score:3

Accepted answer

When you book a multi-leg trip on one ticket, missing any flight cancels all the following tickets.

This is because of airline policy to combat something called "Hidden City Ticketing", which you can Google. For instance a small town like Juneau might subsidize flights into the town. So Juneau-NYC might actually be cheaper than Seattle-NYC. Except all Juneau flights actually flew into Seattle to change planes, so Seattleites discovered they could book Juneau-Seattle-NYC and only fly the second leg. To stop this, airlines cancel all subsequent legs after you miss the first one. This is so "standard operating procedure" that they will do it automatically, even if you had valid reasons for doing it.

So, you need to call the airline back and make sure all your tickets actually do reflect your intended travel, and you don't have any "loose flapping legs" which could cause problems for you or waste your money.

It's perfectly fine if the coming and going are on separate tickets, but it might be a higher fare -- and it would also mean if there was a COVID problem that made the airline cancel and reschedule the outbound, you would not be entitled to a free reschedule of the return.

Upvote:0

If you don't fly the first leg, the airline will cancel the ticket. You have three options

  1. Buy a new one way ticket
  2. Cancel the ticket and try to get some credit for it that you can apply to a new ticket
  3. Change the existing ticket to a one way.

You should price out all three options and go with the cheapest one.

If you change your ticket, the airline will reprice the remaining leg as a one-way ticket and you will have to pay the difference between the new and the ticket old price plus a change fee (which is dependent on the terms and conditions of your initial ticket).

If you are lucky, the one way is cheaper than the original return and you may be able to offset the change fee.

This depends a lot on the exact terms and conditions of the initial ticket.

Upvote:1

If you don't show for the outward leg, you typically lose your complete ticket value. This is understandable, as by simply not showing up, you deprive the airline of any chance to resell your seat.

You can normally save a good chunk of the ticket's value by calling them before the outward leg, and rebooking to the days you want - or even simply cancelling it, and using the value whenever booking any other flight with that airline. There are often significant fees (200 - 300 $ are normal), but for an expensive ticket, there is enough value to recover.

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