Cheat Your Way to a Lower Fare

Filed in archive Cheap Ride on August 31, 2007

Don't you just love it when you find a discounted fare for the route that you are planning to take? It's one step closer to a budget traveler's dream to come true. However, it is not always that easy. Sometimes, the restrictions imposed makes it out of your reach. And you know what is next... you would have to buy a more expensive ticket.

There are ways to cheat your way into getting a discounted fare, though.

Here are a few that are still being practiced despite many airlines' cry for injustice and call for punishments:

Back-to-back Ticketing. It's when you buy two sets of tickets for a particular location and you intentionally use the tickets out of sequence to circumvent an airline's minimum day or weekend stay restriction. For more details on how back-to-back ticketing is done, check here.

Hidden Cities. It's when you buy a ticket for a certain destination which is on sale but you intend to get off at the connecting point rather than at your chosen end destination. Say, you want to go from Washington Dulles (IAD) to San Diego, California (SAN). But the special ticket price only applies if your flight destination is San Francisco (SFO). So, you buy the IAD to SFO ticket but you have no intention to get off at SFO. Instead, you get off at SAN where you are supposed to take the connecting flight from IAD to SFO.

Throwaway Ticketing. Sometimes, all you need is a one-way ticket. Strangely, they are more expensive than getting a roundtrip ticket. So what you do is buy a roundtrip ticket with the intention of just using one segment.

Many airlines call the above practices illegal. And some have even gone to the length of charging the travel agent or the passenger itself the difference in price of the ticket they cheated their way into and the right amount they should have paid had they bought the correct tickets.

What do you think? Would you risk it? Or would you rather patiently check aggregators for better fares?