Airlines sometimes charge more for a one-way ticket than a round-trip ticket to the same destination. If I want to fly one way, it is OK to buy a round-trip ticket to save money, and “throw away” the return ticket?
Or suppose I save money by getting off the plane at an intermediate stop after buying a ticket to a more distant but cheaper destination. This is known as “hidden city” ticketing. Is it ethical?
Question posed by USA Today reporter.
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Ethical Decisions 
Most airlines forbid throwaway and hidden city ticketing in the contract of carriage (which customers rarely read). I am not a lawyer and won’t delve into the legal implications, but I can say this much:
Merely slipping a clause into the fine print of a contract does not ethically bind the other party (legal obligation is another matter). The terms of an ethically binding agreement must be mutually understood. The airline may have legal rights to impose penalties, but this alone does not impose an ethical obligation on the customer.
People often say that buying a hamburger doesn’t obligate me to eat all of it, and so buying an airline ticket doesn’t obligate me to use all of it. But let’s look at this more closely.
Throwaway or hidden city ticketing may involve deception, which is causing another party to believe something you know is false. Deception is normally unethical when this false belief is essential to achieving the purposes of the deception (in ethics-speak, it violates the generalization principle).
Suppose I buy a hamburger to feed it to my pet turtle. Granted, this seems OK, even if my purchase causes the vendor to believe falsely that a human is going to eat the burger. But this belief is not essential to my purpose. The vendor would be happy to sell me the burger if I explained it was for my turtle.
Now suppose that buying a round trip ticket causes an airline agent to believe falsely that I am going to fly a round trip. This belief is essential to my purpose, because the agent would not sell me the ticket (at the stated price) if I explained my intentions.
So we have at least a prima facie case that tricky ticketing is unethical.
As for the crazy pricing structure that airlines use, I can give you a stack of arguments for why it is unethical on their part. But this doesn’t give the customer ethical license to deceive.
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