This is how you have to look at it. If you buy two seperate tickets, for two seperate trips, on different dates, and on your first trip, your flight is cancelled, they aren't going to refund your ticket for the second trip.
Say one week you are going to fly LAX-JFK, and a week later, you have a seperate trip planned, LAX-MIA. If your LAX-JFK flight was cancelled, they aren't going to refund the LAX-MIA trip, because it is seperate, and has nothing to do with the first trip.
In whpress' complaint, he has booked two seperate tickets, under different reservations. Although the second ticket is for him to return home, from the first trip, it stills falls into the same category as my above example. It is a seperate ticket, and thus, they will not refund it. They are calling it a technicality, because, although it is his return trip, it is still booked seperately, and thus is a completely different trip, as far as Delta is concerned.
If I were a manager/supervisor, I would probably do what I could to refund the second trip, being as though common sense would tell me it is this guys return, from his first trip, even though it was booked seperately. However, technically speaking, Delta doesn't have to refund that trip. Lessons learned are that you should never book tickets, in which you will fly on multiple airline, unless you absolutely have to, and you should never book originating, and return trips seperately - they should be within the same reservation.
Another reason the airlines will often not refund a seperate reservation, is that some people do that to take advantage of a one way ticket being cheaper than a roundtrip. It may cost $800, rountrip, to fly AUS-DCA and back to AUS, wheras, booking it seperate, AUS-DCA may cost $150, and DCA-AUS $200 (some may even book on a different airline for each segment), and thus your total goes from $800, to $350. Sure, people can do this, but they risk if something goes wrong on the first segment, they cannot be refunded for the second.
It is a bit of a technicality. In the end, I think each individuals situation is different, however. In this person's situation, I would probably refund his second ticket, with it clearly being a return from his first one.
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