> Skiplagging is not illegal, but airlines view it as a policy violation that is grounds for termination of a traveler’s entire itinerary since the airline can't sell the empty seat in the onward flight.
The poor airline, unable to sell an empty seat because ... checks notes ... the seat is already sold to someone, and that person decided not to show up. Truly the horror. Just think of all the revenue the airline lost because they couldn't charge more for a shorter flight and now have to fly the last leg with less weight
But it seems like the entire court case was mostly centered around the legality of the branding of the website. I guess overall the guy behind skiplagged will be happy to have gotten away with what amounts to 10% of revenue in exchange for a lot of publicity.
Will this verdict stop Skiplagged from continuing its business in the future, either legally or financially? Or is it more like a one-time penalty they have to pay
Funny, in the rental market, most states literally _very enthusiastically_ enforce a housing regulation where is staunchly illegal charge rent to two people for the same property, regardless of whatever contracts they've signed. So you know, how the airlines might book 103% of capacity on a plane? oh yeah, straight to jail. Guy signed a lease and defaulted, you find a substitute renter and you don't cancel the original tenant's payments? also, believe it or not, straight to jail.
Houses are perhaps the exception, because hotel rooms, b&b's, cars, and many other rentals that are sold as services don't benefit from the same protection. I'd postulate it's because a house is not considered replaceable with another one or with a refund, while car rides, flights and short-term accommodations are.
> Skiplagging is not illegal, but airlines view it as a policy violation that is grounds for termination of a traveler’s entire itinerary since the airline can't sell the empty seat in the onward flight.
'Can't' or 'aren't supposed to'? Airlines oversell flights ALL THE TIME. This just allows them to double sell the seat without having to ask anyone to volunteer for a free flight credit on a later flight. Seems like a win-win.
Also... they DID sell that seat. To the person that bought it, and paid for it, and then didn't use it. They didn't cost the airline any money. They paid for the seat. They don't get the money back for the seat they don't use. The airline keeps the money for it, while not incurring the costs of filling it.
I'm astonished it's currently legal for airlines to ban passengers for optimizing their ticket fares—for taking the offers the airlines themselves publicly tender, and being too competent at choosing at the best one.
- "American reportedly removed a 17-year-old from a flight last year and banned him for three years when he tried to fly from Gainesville, Florida, to Charlotte, North Carolina, on a ticket with a final destination of New York City. The ticket was supposedly cheaper than booking a flight to Charlotte alone."
There ought to be a consumer protection law about it. Not one specific to airlines, but a universal protection—a "right to optimize", if you will. If you ban customers for taking advantage of a publicly-advertised offer, then why are you allowed to advertise that offer in the first place?
The advertised offer says "no skiplagging". It's buried in the fine print, but it is indeed there.
You can probably get away with it once, if you convince them that you didn't know. But if you've done it before, they'll say that you knew what the terms of the deal were.
Important note: "skiplagging" while frowned upon and grounds for an airline banning individuals from using them; is not why skiplagged is paying AA $9.4M.
From the article:
Paul Yetter, an attorney for American with Yetter Coleman in Houston, told jurors during opening statements that Skiplagged is not an authorized agent of the airline yet "dresses up" its website with American's trademarks to look legitimate and fool consumers into thinking they are buying from the airline.
> "They ordered New York-based Skiplagged to pay *$4.7 million in disgorgement from the travel site’s revenues* and another $4.7 million for copyright infringement."
The fine is half trademark infringement, half for "costing" AA money through not letting them resell the seat themselves
Agreed. I like the idea of being hostile to the airlines so I’ve used Skiplagged to search for flights before but I’ve never found a hidden city itinerary that I actually wanted to take.
I’m guessing it probably makes sense with certain airports with high fees near concentrations of wealth? E.g. maybe London->NYC costs more than London(->NYC)->Albany because NYC airports have high fees and airlines presume wealthier clientele bound for NYC?
The former is more common than you might think: hub-and-spoke airlines compete on route pricing, but if an airline doesn’t offer a particular direct flight, then it has to offer an indirect one for a comparable price.
This is why you get these weird pricing patterns where the direct flight costs more than the indirect one. They’re deliberately trimming their margins on certain passengers to compete, hoping to make up the lost revenue with direct fliers (or fliers on more expensive routes).
The restrictions aren’t that onerous if you’re really trying to fly for cheap. Business travelers probably won’t do it, but there’s lots of folks who just fly for personal reasons (think: sports fans going to their team’s game, people visiting family, etc.) and who might be willing to put up with the slight risks for a cheaper fare.
Seems like this practice in general shows that a true free market doesn't exist in the airline industry. If it did exist then flights like these wouldn't be profitable to sell in the first place.
We tried a free market airline industry. We rightfully second guessed that for the huge safety problems it created. We then recognized that the skies belong to the public, collectively, and access to it must be licensed as such and commercial activity within it strictly regulated.
Which would all probably work were it not for the obvious pathway to regulatory capture this creates. You need strong regulators that are heavily incentivized towards the American public and not the particular private airlines that happen to currently have a contract.
I wonder, if like banking, it would be smart to separate the companies that own the planes from the companies that actually operate them. A disinterested third party that actually holds the assets might serve as an actual wedge between the FAA and the "major airlines."
I could imagine situations where airlines need to get pilots/crew/planes to some location for the next flight and somehow recoup costs there, and are willing to cut prices on such multileg flights to take business away from their competitors... but I generally agree with your statement.
Skiplagging is a very old practice. What's new here is just the website.
Before 9/11 there was nothing the airlines could do to stop it because you didn't have to show ID to match your ticket. So they couldn't ban you even if they figured out you were skiplagging.
Now they can and they do. Which is why the airlines love that the government "forces" them to check your ID.
> Now they can and they do. Which is why the airlines love that the government "forces" them to check your ID.
Where is this happening? On over 100 domestic flights post-9/11, I've never had an airline review my ID - only on international flights has this occurred.
The TSA or their private equivalent will match your ID to a boarding pass, but even now that's going away at major airports in favor of ID scans.
Regardless, given the above: there's nothing stopping you from booking a refundable fare on Airline B (or even a $0 Frontier flight), using that boarding pass to get through security, and then using whatever name you want on a flight with Airline A.
I don't understand how someone can be barred from an airline because they got a better deal on it. At a certain point there must be an individual who would've been barred from every airline due to this at which point it becomes some sort of cruel punishment on an individual from a whole industry for really doing nothing illegal or wrong or causing a nuisance.
Airlines shouldn't be allowed to barr people simply for skipping a leg on a flight, no matter how much it may annoy someone in management.
>I don't understand how someone can be barred from an airline because they got a better deal on it.
Because they cause a truly stupid amount of inefficiencies and hassle with their desire to save a buck at the cost of everyone else.
I think American Airlines's marketing and legal teams dropped the ball as far as how they impressed the court of public opinion, as demonstrated by this very thread. "We couldn't make more money" will almost never speak to the common man.
But speaking as someone who's familiar with the aviation industry and flies very often, shenanigans like this cause tremendous losses of time and money when margins are razor thin.
A missing passenger means lost time trying to find that passenger which leads to flight delays. Once a passenger is deemed missing, their checked luggage if any needs to be offloaded which causes additional checks of the flight manifest and the cargo bay, leading to even more lost time and flight delays.
A seat unoccupied-but-occupied means that seat couldn't have been used to deadhead the crew for another flight, which can include crews from other airlines. This makes scheduling logistics even harder than it needed to be, leading to inefficiencies and in the worst case flight cancellations.
This all causes problems for people on the ground: The ground crew at the airports, the flight crew on the plane, the logistics team scheduling everything, and more. It's not just middle management that everyone here likes to flip off.
Also a coup de grace for the audience here: Someone skiplagging means the airline flies an empty seat that should have been occupied, wasting fuel. Skiplagging is bad for the environment.
I am very happy American Airlines won this, and I will say the same with any other airline. If you want to fly somewhere, buy a ticket specifically for that. If you engage in skiplagging, you are sincerely a greedy fucking bastard and deserve every blacklisting you get.
I don't understand the airline's argument that they couldn't resell the seat. Of course not, it was already paid for! Can someone make sense of their argument for me, as it seems prima facia illegitimate.
Legacy US airlines don’t always price their seats logically based on fuel, tax, time, and wear costs.
The price for a given multi-leg trip is sometimes discounted by Some Amount from the actual price you would pay buying each leg individually.
This is exploitable by purchasing a discounted fare with (H) hops at price P(H) in order to fly (H-X) hops, where X > 0 and P(H-X) > P(H). I offer no speculation as to their motivations in selling a ticket where P(H-X) > P(H) but I certainly don’t think kind thoughts towards them for the outcomes it creates in airline pricing.
Their complaint against consumers is, in summary, “we could have charged a higher price P(H-X) for the seat that was left empty if the customer had not exploited this P(H) loophole in our pricing, and we deserve to be paid that difference.” This is not strictly relevant to the lawsuit, which is against an agency rather than a consumer, but helps explain their motivations for prosecuting an agency site for exploiting it.
Their complaint against the third party website is both different and more nuanced, but ultimately stems from a site making it trivial for consumers to find and exploit this loophole without domain-specific knowledge known primarily to travel agents and hobbyists. Thus their extreme focus on trademark; if they had succeeded in that claim, they would potentially be able to weaponize the judgment against any site that doesn’t pay them a bribe for showing their logo in association with interpretations of flight pricing data, which would let them harvest millions of dollars of new passive revenue streams; as well as having the option to terminate the existence of any site they dislike that shows their logo or brand. Their trademark claim was denied in full.
The airlines are within their legal rights to cancel tickets and refuse business from customers who exploit this loophole, so long as they do so indiscriminately with respect to the protected characteristics of the individuals refused.
There are no regulations requiring simple coherent pricing where leg+leg+leg = multi-leg fares, either, which is why ITA Software’s Matrix and its ability to resolve traveling salesman pricing problems across the fare code hellscape was worth a billion of dollars to Google.
I didn’t know “skiplagging” was a thing, but I actually did it once myself and almost got in trouble for it.
1. I booked roundtrip A → B → C and C → B → A.
2. I skipped B → C because I needed to spend a few days at B.
3. I booked a separate one-way B → C which was cheap because it was a short hop.
What I didn’t realize was that the airline canceled my C → B → A return trip when I skipped B → C. Fortunately, I discovered this early when I spoke to customer service about an unrelated question: the airline kindly explained to me what happened, warned me not to do it again, and rebooked my flight back.
Well, Skiplagged is still in business and this probably just drives more traffic to their website as this raises awareness. Apparently they have had more than $100M in ticket sales, if not much more.
Any idea what percentage of their sales are actually hidden city itineraries? Every time I’ve searched with them I’ve seen few or no hidden city results, but I guess it’s neat to be aware of the option if it does exist.
I really, really don't understand the airlines' problem with this. The seat was paid for, if nobody is in it, they save a fraction of a penny on fuel. What do they lose if the seat is empty vs the person still sitting in it? They get the exact same revenue. I'm so confused.
Of course they can sell the seat - airlines oversell all the time since they know some people won't show. Just need to predict that with a few statistics and sell some extra tickets for the skiplagged leg. I think airlines should be required to make tickets to intermediary destinations no more expensive than the same class fare to the final destination then there is no incentive to book a skiplagged ticket and it would benefit consumers in less competitive markets. A case of a good regulation. Right now fares to popular competitive destinations are subsidized by price gouging on less popular destinations.
How about we jail airline executives and fine airlines for overselling flights, forcing people to give up their seats, banning people for skiplagging, kicking people off based on clothing, etc. If they can be so arbitrary and refuse passengers, we should just revoke their license to operate.
I implore you to explain how deplaning means they can’t be competitive.
If I jump out of the airplane halfway through a flight, how does that change their pricing beyond me saving them fuel?
The only way this makes sense is a segment rebate scheme for flights to underserved communities. But I don’t think this is what’s at play here because it’s not mentioned at all.
Shouldn't be the opposite? If a route goes ABC, they'd have to sell AB and BC separately instead of bundled? No more "skipping" and any trip that's not direct can freely be assembled from legs on any airline?
I'm not sure that's the case, "offering competitive fares" implies that they are trying to charge less, however no business is going to sue for their right to charge less money. They want to charge more, and are using the legal system to help achieve that end.
> Skiplagging is not illegal, but airlines view it as a policy violation that is grounds for termination of a traveler’s entire itinerary since the airline can't sell the empty seat in the onward flight.
The poor airline, unable to sell an empty seat because ... checks notes ... the seat is already sold to someone, and that person decided not to show up. Truly the horror. Just think of all the revenue the airline lost because they couldn't charge more for a shorter flight and now have to fly the last leg with less weight
But it seems like the entire court case was mostly centered around the legality of the branding of the website. I guess overall the guy behind skiplagged will be happy to have gotten away with what amounts to 10% of revenue in exchange for a lot of publicity.
Yup, and since they routinely oversell flights, I have zero sympathy for them. Negative sympathy even
Will this verdict stop Skiplagged from continuing its business in the future, either legally or financially? Or is it more like a one-time penalty they have to pay
Maybe the site should rebrand itself.
Tell people to get off if the meal on the next leg is ... checks notes... a safety hazard.
If the airline doesn't want people doing this then stop doing ridiculous pricing.
Funny, in the rental market, most states literally _very enthusiastically_ enforce a housing regulation where is staunchly illegal charge rent to two people for the same property, regardless of whatever contracts they've signed. So you know, how the airlines might book 103% of capacity on a plane? oh yeah, straight to jail. Guy signed a lease and defaulted, you find a substitute renter and you don't cancel the original tenant's payments? also, believe it or not, straight to jail.
Houses are perhaps the exception, because hotel rooms, b&b's, cars, and many other rentals that are sold as services don't benefit from the same protection. I'd postulate it's because a house is not considered replaceable with another one or with a refund, while car rides, flights and short-term accommodations are.
Except this happens all the time in hotels…
Exactly, so it's very likely that the seat that they are concerned with will actually be filled, based on the way they operate right now.
> Skiplagging is not illegal, but airlines view it as a policy violation that is grounds for termination of a traveler’s entire itinerary since the airline can't sell the empty seat in the onward flight.
'Can't' or 'aren't supposed to'? Airlines oversell flights ALL THE TIME. This just allows them to double sell the seat without having to ask anyone to volunteer for a free flight credit on a later flight. Seems like a win-win.
Also... they DID sell that seat. To the person that bought it, and paid for it, and then didn't use it. They didn't cost the airline any money. They paid for the seat. They don't get the money back for the seat they don't use. The airline keeps the money for it, while not incurring the costs of filling it.
I'm astonished it's currently legal for airlines to ban passengers for optimizing their ticket fares—for taking the offers the airlines themselves publicly tender, and being too competent at choosing at the best one.
- "American reportedly removed a 17-year-old from a flight last year and banned him for three years when he tried to fly from Gainesville, Florida, to Charlotte, North Carolina, on a ticket with a final destination of New York City. The ticket was supposedly cheaper than booking a flight to Charlotte alone."
There ought to be a consumer protection law about it. Not one specific to airlines, but a universal protection—a "right to optimize", if you will. If you ban customers for taking advantage of a publicly-advertised offer, then why are you allowed to advertise that offer in the first place?
The advertised offer says "no skiplagging". It's buried in the fine print, but it is indeed there.
You can probably get away with it once, if you convince them that you didn't know. But if you've done it before, they'll say that you knew what the terms of the deal were.
Clearly there is no space under the law for common sense. They are in conflict.
Important note: "skiplagging" while frowned upon and grounds for an airline banning individuals from using them; is not why skiplagged is paying AA $9.4M.
From the article:
Paul Yetter, an attorney for American with Yetter Coleman in Houston, told jurors during opening statements that Skiplagged is not an authorized agent of the airline yet "dresses up" its website with American's trademarks to look legitimate and fool consumers into thinking they are buying from the airline.
Half right:
> "They ordered New York-based Skiplagged to pay *$4.7 million in disgorgement from the travel site’s revenues* and another $4.7 million for copyright infringement."
The fine is half trademark infringement, half for "costing" AA money through not letting them resell the seat themselves
It might be why (in the sense of motivation, not law) the suit was filed though.
> no damages being awarded on the trademark claim
so authoritative yet so wrong
I'm surprised that this common enough that it's worthwhile for airlines to fight it. It requires both:
- Flight being meaningfully cheaper using hidden city
and
- Traveller is willing to deal with the restrictions (no carry-on, risk of route changing, no frequent flyer etc).
Agreed. I like the idea of being hostile to the airlines so I’ve used Skiplagged to search for flights before but I’ve never found a hidden city itinerary that I actually wanted to take.
I’m guessing it probably makes sense with certain airports with high fees near concentrations of wealth? E.g. maybe London->NYC costs more than London(->NYC)->Albany because NYC airports have high fees and airlines presume wealthier clientele bound for NYC?
>* the restrictions (no carry-on, ...*
You mean no checked baggage, right? Carry-on is fine.
The former is more common than you might think: hub-and-spoke airlines compete on route pricing, but if an airline doesn’t offer a particular direct flight, then it has to offer an indirect one for a comparable price.
This is why you get these weird pricing patterns where the direct flight costs more than the indirect one. They’re deliberately trimming their margins on certain passengers to compete, hoping to make up the lost revenue with direct fliers (or fliers on more expensive routes).
The restrictions aren’t that onerous if you’re really trying to fly for cheap. Business travelers probably won’t do it, but there’s lots of folks who just fly for personal reasons (think: sports fans going to their team’s game, people visiting family, etc.) and who might be willing to put up with the slight risks for a cheaper fare.
I don't do it often, but skiplagging saved me around $500 on a single SFO-NRT leg.
Seems like this practice in general shows that a true free market doesn't exist in the airline industry. If it did exist then flights like these wouldn't be profitable to sell in the first place.
We tried a free market airline industry. We rightfully second guessed that for the huge safety problems it created. We then recognized that the skies belong to the public, collectively, and access to it must be licensed as such and commercial activity within it strictly regulated.
Which would all probably work were it not for the obvious pathway to regulatory capture this creates. You need strong regulators that are heavily incentivized towards the American public and not the particular private airlines that happen to currently have a contract.
I wonder, if like banking, it would be smart to separate the companies that own the planes from the companies that actually operate them. A disinterested third party that actually holds the assets might serve as an actual wedge between the FAA and the "major airlines."
I could imagine situations where airlines need to get pilots/crew/planes to some location for the next flight and somehow recoup costs there, and are willing to cut prices on such multileg flights to take business away from their competitors... but I generally agree with your statement.
There are almost no industry without some regulatory restrictions on them.
The airlines industry is heavily regulated, as most big-money industries are.
"True free market" does not mean "complete absence of all regulations"!
Reminds me of the famous Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.
[dead]
Skiplagging is a very old practice. What's new here is just the website.
Before 9/11 there was nothing the airlines could do to stop it because you didn't have to show ID to match your ticket. So they couldn't ban you even if they figured out you were skiplagging.
Now they can and they do. Which is why the airlines love that the government "forces" them to check your ID.
> Now they can and they do. Which is why the airlines love that the government "forces" them to check your ID.
Where is this happening? On over 100 domestic flights post-9/11, I've never had an airline review my ID - only on international flights has this occurred.
The TSA or their private equivalent will match your ID to a boarding pass, but even now that's going away at major airports in favor of ID scans.
Regardless, given the above: there's nothing stopping you from booking a refundable fare on Airline B (or even a $0 Frontier flight), using that boarding pass to get through security, and then using whatever name you want on a flight with Airline A.
I also love that I don't have to ride the metal missiles with random unvetted people.
I don't understand how someone can be barred from an airline because they got a better deal on it. At a certain point there must be an individual who would've been barred from every airline due to this at which point it becomes some sort of cruel punishment on an individual from a whole industry for really doing nothing illegal or wrong or causing a nuisance.
Airlines shouldn't be allowed to barr people simply for skipping a leg on a flight, no matter how much it may annoy someone in management.
>I don't understand how someone can be barred from an airline because they got a better deal on it.
Because they cause a truly stupid amount of inefficiencies and hassle with their desire to save a buck at the cost of everyone else.
I think American Airlines's marketing and legal teams dropped the ball as far as how they impressed the court of public opinion, as demonstrated by this very thread. "We couldn't make more money" will almost never speak to the common man.
But speaking as someone who's familiar with the aviation industry and flies very often, shenanigans like this cause tremendous losses of time and money when margins are razor thin.
A missing passenger means lost time trying to find that passenger which leads to flight delays. Once a passenger is deemed missing, their checked luggage if any needs to be offloaded which causes additional checks of the flight manifest and the cargo bay, leading to even more lost time and flight delays.
A seat unoccupied-but-occupied means that seat couldn't have been used to deadhead the crew for another flight, which can include crews from other airlines. This makes scheduling logistics even harder than it needed to be, leading to inefficiencies and in the worst case flight cancellations.
This all causes problems for people on the ground: The ground crew at the airports, the flight crew on the plane, the logistics team scheduling everything, and more. It's not just middle management that everyone here likes to flip off.
Also a coup de grace for the audience here: Someone skiplagging means the airline flies an empty seat that should have been occupied, wasting fuel. Skiplagging is bad for the environment.
I am very happy American Airlines won this, and I will say the same with any other airline. If you want to fly somewhere, buy a ticket specifically for that. If you engage in skiplagging, you are sincerely a greedy fucking bastard and deserve every blacklisting you get.
I don't understand the airline's argument that they couldn't resell the seat. Of course not, it was already paid for! Can someone make sense of their argument for me, as it seems prima facia illegitimate.
Legacy US airlines don’t always price their seats logically based on fuel, tax, time, and wear costs.
The price for a given multi-leg trip is sometimes discounted by Some Amount from the actual price you would pay buying each leg individually.
This is exploitable by purchasing a discounted fare with (H) hops at price P(H) in order to fly (H-X) hops, where X > 0 and P(H-X) > P(H). I offer no speculation as to their motivations in selling a ticket where P(H-X) > P(H) but I certainly don’t think kind thoughts towards them for the outcomes it creates in airline pricing.
Their complaint against consumers is, in summary, “we could have charged a higher price P(H-X) for the seat that was left empty if the customer had not exploited this P(H) loophole in our pricing, and we deserve to be paid that difference.” This is not strictly relevant to the lawsuit, which is against an agency rather than a consumer, but helps explain their motivations for prosecuting an agency site for exploiting it.
Their complaint against the third party website is both different and more nuanced, but ultimately stems from a site making it trivial for consumers to find and exploit this loophole without domain-specific knowledge known primarily to travel agents and hobbyists. Thus their extreme focus on trademark; if they had succeeded in that claim, they would potentially be able to weaponize the judgment against any site that doesn’t pay them a bribe for showing their logo in association with interpretations of flight pricing data, which would let them harvest millions of dollars of new passive revenue streams; as well as having the option to terminate the existence of any site they dislike that shows their logo or brand. Their trademark claim was denied in full.
The airlines are within their legal rights to cancel tickets and refuse business from customers who exploit this loophole, so long as they do so indiscriminately with respect to the protected characteristics of the individuals refused.
There are no regulations requiring simple coherent pricing where leg+leg+leg = multi-leg fares, either, which is why ITA Software’s Matrix and its ability to resolve traveling salesman pricing problems across the fare code hellscape was worth a billion of dollars to Google.
I didn’t know “skiplagging” was a thing, but I actually did it once myself and almost got in trouble for it.
1. I booked roundtrip A → B → C and C → B → A.
2. I skipped B → C because I needed to spend a few days at B.
3. I booked a separate one-way B → C which was cheap because it was a short hop.
What I didn’t realize was that the airline canceled my C → B → A return trip when I skipped B → C. Fortunately, I discovered this early when I spoke to customer service about an unrelated question: the airline kindly explained to me what happened, warned me not to do it again, and rebooked my flight back.
That is actually a different rule: the tickets have to be used in order.
Say you booked round trip A to B back to A and decide to drive from A to B. Tada! Your B to A segment is automatically cancelled as well.
In a way this is even more absurd than airlines banning hidden city ticketing.
I did this once too, and had to pay a “reinstatement fee” to get on the original trip back.
Well, Skiplagged is still in business and this probably just drives more traffic to their website as this raises awareness. Apparently they have had more than $100M in ticket sales, if not much more.
Any idea what percentage of their sales are actually hidden city itineraries? Every time I’ve searched with them I’ve seen few or no hidden city results, but I guess it’s neat to be aware of the option if it does exist.
I really, really don't understand the airlines' problem with this. The seat was paid for, if nobody is in it, they save a fraction of a penny on fuel. What do they lose if the seat is empty vs the person still sitting in it? They get the exact same revenue. I'm so confused.
They lose out on selling more expensive fares.
Of course they can sell the seat - airlines oversell all the time since they know some people won't show. Just need to predict that with a few statistics and sell some extra tickets for the skiplagged leg. I think airlines should be required to make tickets to intermediary destinations no more expensive than the same class fare to the final destination then there is no incentive to book a skiplagged ticket and it would benefit consumers in less competitive markets. A case of a good regulation. Right now fares to popular competitive destinations are subsidized by price gouging on less popular destinations.
How about we jail airline executives and fine airlines for overselling flights, forcing people to give up their seats, banning people for skiplagging, kicking people off based on clothing, etc. If they can be so arbitrary and refuse passengers, we should just revoke their license to operate.
So bogus.
For those who are wondering, skiplagging does work, and can save you a boatload of $$$.
AND you have to understand the system and have some attention to detail, especially internationally.
American Airlines specifically on that title
I am on the airlines side really. They set the fare from A to B.
If you start have people skipping they can no longer offer the competitive fares. The solution could be fines for doing it as a general principle.
They also may cause delays due to final calls, security and manifest checks etc.
I implore you to explain how deplaning means they can’t be competitive.
If I jump out of the airplane halfway through a flight, how does that change their pricing beyond me saving them fuel?
The only way this makes sense is a segment rebate scheme for flights to underserved communities. But I don’t think this is what’s at play here because it’s not mentioned at all.
Shouldn't be the opposite? If a route goes ABC, they'd have to sell AB and BC separately instead of bundled? No more "skipping" and any trip that's not direct can freely be assembled from legs on any airline?
I'm not sure that's the case, "offering competitive fares" implies that they are trying to charge less, however no business is going to sue for their right to charge less money. They want to charge more, and are using the legal system to help achieve that end.