Originally Posted by
Groundloop
Why? When purchasing a ticket you enter into a contract with the airline. By not travelling on all legs you would be breaking the contract. This will no doubt be somewhere in the Ts and Cs which everybody tick-boxes but do not read!
The law in EUrope is that some conditions from the general T&C are not enforcible. A judge would certainly scratch is head why using
less services than one paid for would mean that the customer would have to pay
more! (No surprise that Lufthansa lost the first round in court.)
The issue is that airlines have a non-natural fare structure (buy less, pay more) and hate it when customers make creative use of the fare structure for their own benefit. (I recall the times when one-way trips were more expensive than returns... which caused quite a lot of cancellations of the return leg. Making returns more expensive than one-way tickets changed that.)
I am not convinced that a pricing strategy that makes hidden city ticketing profitable is a fair business practice. Why should direct passengers subsidize passengers who have a stop to the extent that the passengers that travel more pay less.