I’ve recently heard of two instances where travellers have ended up paying nearly double the original price, en-route, because of a misunderstanding of how airline tickets work.
As business travellers change plans so often it’s really important that you read this so that these scenarios will never happen to you – or your travellers!
Scenario 1
A traveller booked on Expedia to fly with South African Airways to Cape Town at a fare of £863.
As no direct services were available the flight was routed as follows:
London–Johannesburg-Cape Town and returning: Cape Town–Johannesburg-London
After the first leg, on arriving in Johannesburg, he decided against taking the onward flight to Cape Town and instead made other arrangements.
After 3 weeks, he tried to check in for his return flight at Cape Town only to be told that his ticket was invalidated by his failure to use it as originally booked. He subsequently missed the flight and had to pay £600 for an alternative British Airways flight back to London.
Scenario 2
A traveller booked a cheap ticket with BA to fly London-Zurich-London.
He then changed his plans and bought a new ticket London to Madrid and Madrid to Zurich.
He said to me, “it’s OK I already have a flight for the Zurich back to London leg”
He too was unaware that a failure to travel out on the London-Zurich flight resulted in the entire round trip journey being cancelled.
There are two reasons why the airlines do this:
The main reason is to do with “revenue protection”
Let’s say for example that the airlines charge very high prices for Zurich-London flights. (They don’t but this is just the reasoning)
You could be devious and instead of paying the high one-way fare, book a cheap London-Zurich-London and just use the 2nd leg
The other reason is that if you failed to turn up for a flight, the airline could assume that you had no intention of travelling the other flights either. In the old days, re-confirmation was the norm and would have avoided some of these pitfalls. Nowadays however, it’s down to you….
The moral of these stories is this;
Always travel as booked. If plans change, don’t assume that you can simply turn up for other parts of your journey. You need to tell the airline or agent exactly what you intend doing. They will then offer you the best course of action… either re-routing your ticket, or refunding the original ticket and rebooking. Do this and you’ll avoid paying dearly for your mistakes.
