[PHXFlyer]

If, as you say, you are a 1 milion miler on Northwest and Delta (is that one million miles on each or a cobined one million miles on both?) then you certainly are contradictory:

- I have had similar occasions and have never been charged a fee

Perhaps fees have been waived for YOU based on YOUR status, but we are talking about your son here. Unless you are traveling with him you should know that YOUR status does not transfer to HIS ticket.*

- the reservation was intact - missing a leg did not change the return

As a million-miler you should be well aware that missing one segment in an itinerary causes the remaning segments to be cancelled. Your son's itinerary was GRR-MSP-EAU outbound and EAU-MSP-GRR return. Let's say an unscrupulous person discovered that the total fare for a GRR-EAU round-trip was less than that of a GRR-MSP ticket and decided to buy the ticket to Eau Claire but just walk away in Minneapolis and call Northwest and say "I became too ill to fly the second leg, could you just drop the MSP-EAU part of the ticket..." If such a person was able to do so without paying any additional fees/fare they have just "beat the system" and robbed the airline of revenue.

Please don't take this the wrong way. I am not saying you tried this, I am just pointing out why these rules exist and that arbitrary enforcement allows persons like the one in my example to get away with fraud.

- I am well aware of the regulations

You are well aware of the regulations yet you still feel the rules shouldn't apply to you or your son because of the "unique situation" here. Your situation is far from unique. People become ill all the time. Be it before their travel even begins, during, or when they have reached their destination if changes have to be made as a result of the illness one should expect to pay any fees applicable to the fare purchased.

Were you also aware that for a few dollars travel insurance could have been purchased to protect you from paying these fees? Of course you would probably have to provide medical documatation of the illness. By the time you add up the cost of the insurance plus the visit to the doctor in order to get the change fee re-imbursed by the insurance company it would probably have been nearly the $150 you paid to have the itinerary re-instated.

- I am also well aware of the latitude that supervisors have - I maintain that there could have been other considerations taken

Arline agents and even supervisors have less and less and sometimes no latitude when it comes to the application of fees and collection of additional fare. Some airline's systems will not even allow a ticket to be re-issued unless the fee and/or additional fare has been collected. Front line employees are micro-managed to the point of recording every phone conversation and keystroke. Can you blame an employee for enforcing the rules when not doing so could mean disciplinary action against them?

- rules are in place to keep order - common sense is still a factor in the decision making process

Sure common sense should be factor in any decision making process, but the higher-ups at the airlines have factored that out of the equation.

*Had you parted with some of your "millions of miles" for your son to travel on an award ticket, you probably could have avoided this whole mess. Are you aware that your status WOULD transfer to your son's ticket due to the fact that the miles for that ticket were from the account of a frequent traveler with status? Often, fees for changes to award tickets are waived, especially if the origin and destination of the ticket remains the same. Since a domestic round-trip is the same number of miles regardless if it's from Los Angeles to New York or Grand Rapids to Eau Claire missing the connecting flight was certainly not an indication of any attempt to circumvent the fare structure.