Travelers are getting really savvy and that’s exciting stuff. More and more people are figuring out that by buying tickets from nearby cities you can often save hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Which just leaves that one little detail: getting to the nearby city. Every day our inbox floods with one simple question. Can I skip the first leg of my flight and just go to the rest?
Spoiler Alert: No
No, you cannot. It won’t work. Don’t you think EVERYONE would do that?! There’s a really simple rule to follow in airline ticket world. If you miss a segment, the rest are cancelled. It’s that simple. Once you miss one, all your other flights are cancelled, even if they are on different airlines.
Interline Systems
Yes, indeed. Even if you are booked on different airlines but on the same reservation, they almost certainly have systems in place to show whether or not you were on your previous flight. If you didn’t show – they’ll cancel all the rest of your trip. Buying tickets while you’re at the airport are NEVER cheap.
What You Can Do
It’s always theoretically possible to skip the last segment of a trip, provided you have one or all of these: an overnight connection, no checked bags, change of airport. If you have any, you can theoretically skip the last segment. Despite fear mongering, no airline has ever done anything to anyone who did not announce to the airline they planned on doing this. Just don’t do it often.
This always confused me about fuel dumps, when ppl pointed out 1X(?) options. I could never figure out how that would work.