Next time take the train

The airlines' inflexibility is absolutely mindboggling. I wanted to skip the first leg of the return trip from Zurich to Schipol and instead take the night train from Tuebingen directly to Schipol. I had a sleeper car all booked for the 8 hr train ride. But nooooooo! NWA wouldn't let me simply omit one leg of the trip. Doing so would cancel the remainder of the return trip and if I hadn't checked this I would have been royally screwed upon arriving at Schipol. Why this should be so, however, is beyond me. It is illogical to put it mildly. I have already paid for the seat; all I wanted to do was not use it. Nope, they consider the ticket "a contract" which cannot be broken. What a bunch of jerks. And for them to be this way with the prices they charge is really frustrating.

So, what's to be learned from this? In the future, consider booking open-jaw tickets to begin with, or pick some central (cheap) location to fly in to and then commute via train beyond. Setting up connections via the airlines is too constricting. The trains here are much more flexible, offering a larger variety of connections with cancellations honored fairly quickly (and in full in most cases). I should not have booked this trip with Zurich being the flight's endpoint. Instead, I should have either picked a more central city like Frankfurt or Amsterdam and connected via train, or picked Stuttgart as the flight destination since that is the more logical point of departure. For future reference: ALWAYS CONSIDER THE LAST CITY BEING VISITED AS THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FIRST!