Reply To: Skipping last leg – will I get in trouble?

[JDB]

@Matt the forty years reference was about the big gap between ex-EU prices and ex-London prices that the OP suggested might somehow be fixed suggesting it was somehow recent. As it happens, some captains of industry were stopped at First and Concorde check-in about forty years ago for having ex-EU (or whatever it was called then) paper tickets with an unflown first sector and was in the newspapers as intended and planned by BA as an effective method of curtailing or at least limiting the practice. I was tangentially involved then and remain so.

More relevantly however, people are getting caught today with various types of fare/ticket abuse and the fact that you don’t read about it on FT or here means nothing. The fact is people, even the cockiest ones, are incredibly sheepish about announcing they have been caught out on this in exactly the same way as we read about incredibly few people having their Amex accounts shut down vs those actually closed.

The bottom line is that if you breach the terms or fare rules, there is a risk of consequences. It’s probably not a very high risk, especially if only done occasionally but it’s a risk and there’s nothing to stop BA or anything other European airline having a blitz if they felt it was getting excessive. For revenue recognition purposes, airlines are very aware of unused coupons. The structure of fares within Europe (vs US/Canada) makes BA less bothered by nesting.