>>Those are called hidden city fares and I used to do them all the time. It had something to do with the hub and spoke system, where they tried to route passengers through the big hubs like O'Hare. For seven months I was going back and forth to Denver every week (very similar to this project) and the tickets were usually Milwaukee-Chicago-Denver. I would throw away the Milw-Chicago tickets and use the Chicago-Denver ones. The travel agent, Carolyn (this was back when there was such a thing), even booked them so it looked like I was always staying over Saturday nights, which saved a lot of money, at least then. So you would use the front part of one round trip booking on Monday (in my case) and the back half of a different booking coming back on Friday. There were two pitfalls. I couldn't check any baggage when going from Chicago to Denver. What are you doing checking baggage, you got on in Milwaukee ;-) Also, if they caught you doing this there was hell to pay for both the passenger and the travel agent. I heard after the job was over with that Carolyn did get caught and had to stop doing it. Some yo-yo went ahead and tried to check baggage.
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>I'm surprised you were able to do that. Once you failed to show up in Milwaukee, I would have expected them to cancel the rest of your ticket.
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>That's, in fact, why I didn't book the cheaper PHL-DTW-Toledo run. I was pretty sure then when I didn't get on the DTW-Toledo, I'd lose the rest of the trip.
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It worked like a champ, week after week. This was 1992, so maybe they weren't quite as linked in as they are now. IIRC one week Oklahoma City was the hidden city, which made absolutely no sense.