In addition to all the direct, personal-consequence issues mentioned by gwillen as to why you shouldn't do this, there are also knock-on effects for other people. For example, if enough people do this on a specific route, it can lead to the price changing for everybody, or to the airline dropping the route altogether. (Leaving other people worse off as a result of your actions.)
This is because there's a reason these weird fares exist, and it's to compete with direct flights provided by other carriers, to pick up business they wouldn't otherwise get. When you skip out on a flight midway, you remove the airline's economic incentive to offer the reduced fare in the first place. As with stock market strategies, this makes such techniques anti-inductive: they will only work so long as few or no people actually use them.
If you know about an anti-inductive loophole in a system, the last thing you should do is advertise its existence or promote its use, unless your intention is to get rid of the loophole. (And if getting rid of the loophole hurts other people as a side effect, then perhaps it's not such a good idea.)
Can you comment on whether the existence of the loophole does or does not indicate that the airline is charging more than it needs to / why the destruction of the loophole does or does not eliminate some sort of market inefficiency and/or undermine a price gouging strategy?
My intuition says that loopholes like this aren't supposed to exist in an idealized model of an efficient market, but I haven't properly worked out any reasoning either way so I am curious if someone has. I can't see any moral objection either way to using price gouging or destroying pri...
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.