The one that really irritated me was on our flight to Scotland a couple of years ago. There was no direct flight to Scotland from Atlanta.
So, we had to connect somewhere. The prices seemed to be too high. Checking on the east coast the prices were much cheaper. Then I checked flights from Atlanta to the east coast. Hmm, those weren't bad either. Then I checked the same two flights that made up the trip from Atlanta to Edinburgh through Newark. What!? The two separate flights combined were something like $400 cheaper than the flight booked as one ticket. They were the
EXACT same flights. Same airline, same day, same times, same flight numbers. Around a $400 per person difference in price.
Yeah, I bought two round trip tickets for each of us. One Atlanta-Newark, one Newark-Edinburgh.
There were five of us traveling; one went earlier for study abroad, but same thing. That was $2,000 difference. That pays for a lot of vacation fun.
Then the airline didn't want to check the bags thru to Edinburgh from Atlanta.
I stood there for almost an hour politely chewing up time from two people until they did print tags to go to Edinburgh for us, so we wouldn't have to run and recheck the bags in Newark. I wore them down.
In the end they had to get someone in Houston to print the tags on the printer in Atlanta to do it. Drove my youngest nuts as she kept worrying that we'd be late and miss our flight; we had plenty of time. Ended up not being an issue as the plane in Newark was late, so we would have had tons of time, but we at least avoided the hassle. They were better about tagging the bags to Atlanta from Edinburgh. We had to grab them momentarily in Newark for customs, but they were ready to go back on the belt to go to Atlanta.
Really irks me that the airlines changed policy to grab more dollars this way. They used to easily print tags for your whole flight for separate reservations. Even the people at the Atlanta counter said, "we used to be able to do this".