When is a one-way airline ticket not a one-way ticket?

Last summer, my niece purchased a one-way ticket from Boston to Las Vegas, then another from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and a return flight from Los Angeles to Boston. Each leg cost the same whether one-way or half of a round-trip and each was researched as a one-way ticket. But upon ticketing, on one document they became intertwined. Why?

In the old days, when round-trip tickets meant that passengers were getting a significant bargain (they still do on international flights), airlines forced passengers to use both the outbound and return portions of their airline tickets in order to receive the far less-expensive round-trip airfare.

Back then, business travelers often participated in what was called “back-to-back” or “nested” traveling. This practice allowed business travelers who were traveling to the same city often to travel in on one round-trip ticket, then fly home on another ticket, then return the next week on the return portion of the second ticket and, finally, return home using the return portion of the original ticket.

Today, since airlines price their airfares at basic one-way prices, that practice is no longer necessary. However, airlines still treat round-trip tickets as some sort of unbreakable bargain. Any passenger who misses the first flight on a multi-flight ticket is required to pay change fees for that flight, as well as any other flights and the return flight, plus any increases in airfare.

Missing the first leg of a ticket with more than a single one-way booking, according to the airline rules, voids all following flights. This, even though the future flights have nothing to do with the missed flight and there is no economic benefit to the passenger.

There is no reason for this kind of operation. It is a secret cash cow for airlines.

Back to the story about my niece. Because of work, she had to reschedule her flight to Las Vegas. The change/cancellation fee was more than the original airfare, so it made no economic sense to cancel her flight or change it. She simply purchased another ticket on the same airline.

From Las Vegas to Los Angeles, because of changes in her work schedule, she had to abandon the originally scheduled flight. She ended up flying on a different airline, since that airline was offering a far better airfare than her original ticket.

Finally, she ended up at the ticket counter with a fully paid, advance purchase ticket from Los Angeles to Boston. Only then, she learned that since she had not used the previous two segments on her ticket, her ticket had been canceled.

The airline told her that she would have to pay $1,400 for a one-way, last-minute ticket.

Of course, as these stories go, my niece called me (in the middle of the night, in DC) and asked me what to do. First, I assessed that she had a place to spend the night. Then I checked with Southwest Airlines, that was offering a flight the next day from Los Angeles to Boston for $303. Then I suggested that she return to the original airline and see what they could do for her for the next day. They offered to take whatever value was left in her totally-unused-three-segment ticket and charge her around $325 for the same flight the next night.

I suggested, at the time, that was the best she could do. She departed the next day. The airline banked all of the money she had paid for her ticket, plus an additional $325 or so. That kind of practice is nothing short of highway/airway robbery.

Nowhere, when researching one-way tickets, do airlines reveal the arcane rules, left over from the old days, that will automatically change a one-way into a ticket that is dependent on other purchased tickets.

This kind of change is done secretly and without the purchaser’s knowledge. Plus, the arbitrary reclassification of three one-way tickets into a series of connecting flights, even when there are days between “connections,” is plain wrong and is due to the lack of rule transparency. It is clearly misleading and deceptive.

These kinds of rules should be abolished. The airline that started the movement towards one-way airfares is Southwest Airlines. Their segments are independent of each other. The only requirement for passengers in their customer-friendly universe is to notify the airline so that they can release seats prior to the flight. Once that happens, the value of the canceled segment is deposited into the customer’s account and the follow-on segments are left unchanged.

Other airlines should treat their ticket changes the same way, rather than changing the rules in mid-purchase.

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