I recently wanted a Zurich -> San Francisco -> Buenos Aires -> Zurich ticket. This was either not possible or unreasonably priced so I ended up with two indepen

I recently wanted a Zurich -> San Francisco -> Buenos Aires -> Zurich ticket. This was either not possible or unreasonably priced so I ended up with two independent tickets, one for the Zurich -> SF round trip and another with a SF -> BA round trip. Well the BA -> SF return stopped in NYC one day and SF -> Zurich stopped there the next day and I didn't see much point flying across the country on consecutive days, so I tried to cancel those legs of my ticket (buying the ticket without these superfluous legs would have cost $2000 more than what I bought). Cancelling the first cross-country flight was going to cost around $200 so instead I just walked out of the airport in NYC after clearing customs. I tried to cancel the second, but Continental told me that I couldn't cancel part of the trip and would have to rebook with no credit from my existing ticket (a 1-way NYC -> ZRH would be $2700, compare to a round trip at $600). Fortunately, the NYC -> ZRH leg was operated by Lufthansa which apparently doesn't talk very closely with Continental because they didn't blink an eye when I showed up at the airport after "missing" the Continental flight from SF. Had Continental been operating the last leg, they would have turned me away and I'd have been stuck buying a new ticket, but still better off than formally cancelling because of not paying the cancellation fee. I had hoped that ubiquitous online travel indexing would bring some sanity to the airline pricing model, but this does not seem to be happening. I fail to see how having ticketed passengers that don't plan to fly, financially rewarding passengers for being deceptive about which flights they will board, and incentivising mixed-carrier tickets for the flexibility they lend is helpful to their bottom line.