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Comment by atdrummond | Hacker News Reader

Hidden city ticketing isn't the same thing and can result in losing access to one's frequent flier account or even being banned from an airline. In the US I'd only risk it on Southwest.

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Are there any reports of anyone being banned or punished in any way for this? (with the exception of bloggers/youtubers who are advertising the practice)

I did that two years ago when flying from Los Angeles . Not to save money but travel plans had changed so it was better to get off in Amsterdam instead of continuing to London. It took a lot of convincing to get the airline to stop the bags in Amsterdam. Finally they did it but we got a stern warning to never do this again. Not sure if there would have been a ban but they really really really didn’t like it.

That is with bags though, with understandable is more work for them.

I don't think it's about more work. I was in a similar situation where we didn't have any checked luggage and simply wanted to let the company know not to wait for us for the second leg of the flight. They made a scene and said that if we don't show up, we'll be breaking some agreement with them and there might be consequences.

My understanding is that they are hell-bent on discouraging people from buying cheaper multi-hop flight tickets for one hop only.

Possible. Although I don’t really understand why it’s more work.

They have to manually intercept your bags from being transferred to the next flight.

Are you sure? At check in they always put a destination sticker on the bags. In this case they just put Amsterdam instead of London on the bag. It didn’t seem to be much of a hassle.

You normally check in bags for your final destination when all legs of the trip are with the same airline

Probably a dozen posts on FlyerTalk alone per year about people receiving a letter telling them never to do it again, being assessed a bill for lost revenue, or having their FF account banned.

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