The Z writes...
This has always been perplexing to me: airlines offer a completely over-inflated cost to travel 1-way, yet if you just add on a return ticket (which you don’t plan to use at all), the price drops.
I’m planning to go overground, by bus/train/4×4 from Buenos Aires all the way up to Lima for about a month, and then I need to fly back down to Buenos Aires to gather up all my stuff and use the rest of my return ticket from here to San Francisco. So I only need a one-way flight from Lima back down to Buenos Aires. So, as a good little consumer, I went to find a flight on the LAN site, and discovered this absurd price…
Seriously?????!?!?!
What exactly do the airlines think you’re going to do as a customer? See the $1300 fare and accept that that must just be the price of flying?
So, I tried seeing what the cost was for round-trip, and was pleasantly surprised to find I could have the same flight (plus an extra return fare I won’t be using) for only $372.
A quarter the price for a 2-way ticket? Okay...
So… LAN – you can suck it. I’ll take my ticket for $375 one-way to Buenos Aires and then I might just need to “cancel” my return to Lima.
Silly airlines – when will you ever learn!??!?!
Graeme
April 23, 2012 at 08:54
It’s possible the expensive fare is from a different fare bucket, and is much more flexible (not all economy tickets are created equal, and business travellers are often gouged a premium for things like no-charge cancellation or rebooking). So although the return offers the same journey for less, it’s not necessarily the same product.
However, it could well be, because airlines are weird like that (it’s often cheaper to fly Amsterdam-London-US on BA than just the UK-US leg, since they have no real competition at home but do on the continent). However, they’re also ruthless, so if you try to cancel the return leg there may be a clause deep in the t&c’s that allows them to try and recover the price of what you actually intended to fly. Better to just accidentally miss that return flight by no-showing at the airport. Too many such throwaway segments can cause issues with your frequent flyer account if you have one, though!