Originally Posted by
Haven't a clue
What the airlines hated was people booking return tickets and throwing away one or more the return sectors to get the overall trip price down. What we are discussing here is no show for outbound resulting in then cancelling the inbound. Yes flexibility to change flights comes at a significantly greater price, but we are not talking about flexibility. If a passenger (sorry "customer") communicates the intention to give up a paid for sector outbound to the obvious advantage of the airline concerned why should the inbound sector be automatically cancelled?
Much less common these days with Lo-Cos, demand pricing etc but I used to fly to Bristol every couple of weeks on BA/Brymon. It was much cheaper to book two opposite return journey spread over a month (so EDI-BRS on a Monday, with BRS to EDI on the Thursday 2 weeks later and BRS-EDI on the first Thursday with that return being on the Monday 2 weeks ). On a few occasions, I booked two returns where I had no intention of using the retrun legs, but it was cheaper than a single return trip. Then a long came Go then Easyjet and the whole world changed