Tickets: 2 singles = return?

[teleport]

Apologies if this has been covered before.
Airlines rotinely cancel the return leg if, the outbound leg has not been flown.
So: would it be wiser to buy 2 single legs to protect ones' investment OR are these legs fused together to constitute a return ticket?:confused:

People, this week nervous of being caught out by the fog debacle, could have resorted to the certainty of Eurostar trains in addition to their previously booked flights. In this case good luck would be if their flight to CDG or BRU were cancelled. Bad luck would be if BA did fly, and the return flight was invalidated.

[BRUpax]

Buying two singles most probabbly equates to buying an unrestricted return. The return is automatically cancelled if the outbound leg is not used on a RESTRICTED ticket.

[PAXboy]

Yes, the topic has been covered from all angles!

If you try to make two separate purchases I guess there is a good chance that the booking computer will be set up to recognise this as the billing address will be the same. Some carriers do not allow you to book a single sector that originates in a country other than your county of billing but some people have billing address' in more than one country.

Overall, the time and cost of taking the trouble to do this, against the chances of you needing this kind of get out are very small.

If your outbound sector did operate, my guess is that you woul dbe able to use the return - providing you call the carrier in advance. My experience of being involved in a major problem says that most of the usual rules are set aside.

[OverRun]

I don’t think that buying 2 singles would trigger any problems at all in the booking system.

As BRUpax said, the bit about cancelling a return ticket if one leg is unused is there only to maximise the airline’s income. If they have sold the return as discounted mileage, they don’t want it to be used to bleed revenue from the chance to sell higher priced mileage. The same applies to multi-leg tickets and all the way through to round-the-world tickets. The only exception is if the airline allows ‘open jaw’ which is basically a break in the flight. i.e. a round the world Sydney-LAX-NY-LON-HKG-SYD could also be sold as Sydney-LAX break for individual travel NY-LON-HKG-SYD. However the airline usually charges more for open-jaw tickets.

The single ticket sales are at the highest price mileage the airline thought they could get at the time. No reason to cancel it if you make another flight anywhere on their system. They have quite possibly already got more money out of you by charging the single fare at a higher mileage than a return fare anyway. And if you try to cancel or change one of your single tickets, they will probably charge you for that as well and get more money out of you.

[late developer]

Must surely have been said before, but just in case anyone in Europe is wondering, I can state I have never in recent years had any problems using a return leg with Ryanair when the outbound leg was simply "not flown".

[BRUpax]

Latedeveloper, that's correct because most (if not all) LCCs sell on a per sector basis (effectively two singles). If, however, you fly with a legacy carrier which sells a reduced RETURN which is subject to specific restrictions, the return leg will not be honoured if the outbound is (deliberately) not flown. I state "deliberately" because exceptions are made if the outbound sector is was not flown due to operational reasons and no alternative was found.