why would he have to purchase something he already paid for? Lets just suppose he missed his original flight and got to his destination another way. Do you forfeit the return flight if you didn’t get on the flight outbound?
He apparently had a round-trip ticket, and they canceled the entire itinerary (but keeping his money), while he was aboard the first flight. So he had to re-book and pay (again) for the second one-way ticket to get home.
good question... i missed a flight, my fault... when i got to the gate too late, they immediately put me on the next flight, which was a few minutes later... once when i was in an unfamiliar airport, running late, i was frantic when i found out my gate was waaaayyyy on the other side of the airport... security told me not to worry... that Southwest Airlines is good about such things and would put me on the next flight... this was about a year ago... i have other examples of how accommodating Southwest Airlines is...
There is a trick that frequent flyers used to do all the time called "hidden destination" cities. Say you wanted a one way ticket from Ft. Meyers to Grand Rapids. The price is $549. But if you bought a round trip ticket from Grand Rapids to Ft. Meyers and back again, the entire round trip ticket was $249. Airlines do this sort of pricing all the time.
So you buy the round trip ticket, but only actually use the return portion. Airlines have caught on and have started cancelling round trip tickets if you don't show up for the first leg.
There's another variation of this trick where a flight from NY to say Chicago is $500, but a flight from NY to LA, with a stopover in Chicago, is $250. You buy the NY to LA ticket, don't check any bags, and just get off in Chicago.
Yes it happened to us on Delta.
All airlinews do that