Exact current information on "missing a return flight"?

score:6

Accepted answer

For the most part, they do not, it is a waste of their resources. Onward travel on the same ticket will likely be voided, although in practise this depends on the IT competence of the airline in question.

The airline may cancel your frequent flier account if you do it very frequently. In the United States, some airlines threaten to recover the fare difference from you, but I am not aware of any case in which this was upheld as a lawful remedy. Certainly within the European Union it would not be an enforceable contract term.

The airlines' sole remedy is to cancel your frequent flier account, and any points there accruing.

Therefore, there is not much more the airline can do about it. For example, British Airways states in their general conditions they do not even claim to have any recourse against you beyond cancelling any further travel on the same ticket. See section 3c, in particular 3c2:

"Your ticket is no longer valid if you do not use all the coupons in the sequence provided in the ticket. Where you change your travel without our agreement and the price for the resulting transportation you intend to undertake is greater than the price originally paid, you will be requested to pay the difference in price. Failure to pay the price applicable to your revised transportation will result in refusal of carriage."

Upvote:5

To answer the concrete question, how airlines determine who is being malicious and who is actually missing their flight?

By frequency.

The airlines have IT systems that allow them to statistically track all fliers. They know what happens in 99% of the cases and how frequent cancellations or non-attendance for the second leg are. When someone maliciously, once in a lifetime, drops the second leg, they won't know. It can be a coincidence. However, by the nature of the beast, people who are doing this are not once-in-a-lifetime fliers. They travel rather frequently and will most likely do this several times. On top of that, the people who do this only once are not as much as concern for the airlines, so they focus on people who do that frequently.

In their data, they can identify pretty quickly who is doing this regularly and then are able to start asking questions. But as stated in other answers, the possibilities for the airlines to do anything about it are very limited. Their best chance is to make it harder for you to find out the price difference and to not make it that clear to you that there will be no "real" consequences.

This is shown quite clearly in the fact that United Airlines tried to Sue skiplagged.com (which helps you booking those flights) end of 2014 instead of putting the pressure on customers using the service - because they cannot.

Upvote:6

Based on your premise that the family does call in the fact that they need to cancel their booking due to a medical emergency then they have duly notified the airline and their missing the return flight would not mark them as "skipper-outers".

Most of the major airlines do not sell "non-changeable" international tickets. The cheapest fares are "non-refundable", but almost always changeable for a fee. Some of the cheapest LCCs do sell "non-refundable & non-changeable", but they aren't part of your scenario. So in your scenario the family will likely have been offered the opportunity to reschedule and hopefully their insurance will cover the change fees due to the medical emergency.

If they skipped the flight without notifying the airline, then the gate agents would flag their booking as a no show. And as they are a family of five from outside the country, then it maybe that someone else in the corporate office will review the booking and determine if any follow ups are warranted.

The airlines do pursue "skipper-outers", but not all. Mostly it is a issue of cost to be recovered vs legal investment to do so, serial "skipper-outer" vs one time infrequent flyer.

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