US Bank FlexPoints to the Rescue when Throw Away / Hidden City Tickets Backfire
The purpose of this post is not to debate the moral or ethical issues behind throw away / hidden city tickets, but rather to share my friend’s costly story. For those unfamiliar with throw away / hidden city tickets, the concept is pretty easy to understand:
- Flights from City A to City B cost $200.
- Flights from City A to City C with a connection in City B only cost $100.
- Purchase a ticket from City A to City C and leave the airport in City B.
- Gary @ View from the Wing has a great post regarding the pitfalls of throw away / hidden city tickets.
Airlines obviously frown upon this technique (similar to my card counting analogy from yesterday) and discourage passengers from booking throw away / hidden city tickets. I unintentionally used this technique when I was coming home from Dublin with my family a few years back. The outbound route was LAX-BOS-DUB and the inbound route was DUB-ORD-LAX on United / Aer Lingus. I wanted to visit my grandparents in Atlanta, so instead of flying the last segment (ORD-LAX) with my family, I bought a ticket to ATL on Delta. I believe this is technically considered throw away / hidden city ticketing, but I didn’t care. It would have cost more money to change my United ticket from ORD-LAX to ORD-ATL than it cost to buy a separate Delta ticket from ORD-ATL. There is a lot of gray area, as you can probably tell.
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