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.
First one is a "So what, just remove the American Airlines trademarks". They can drop them and say all good, and presumably not get sued again.
Second one is about what Skiplag was doing itself; I.E. cutting into AA's profits. If they continue to do this, the next court case will be much more expensive. Most courts don't like it when you get sued for something and treat it like the cost of doing business, and AA is big enough that I'd count on them bringing suit again.
Tell people to get off if the meal on the next leg is ... checks notes... a safety hazard.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/travel-price-track...
'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.
- "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?
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.
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
The title of the article & and the article itself does make it sound like AA were awarded the money directly because of the practice of 'skiplagging'... which doesn't seem to be the case. Though it's probably the reason they were targeted in the first place as ejddhbrbrrnrn said.
- 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).
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?
Some routes are literally subsidized - for example, the Essential Air Service program pays airlines to run flights to places that would otherwise be unprofitable to fly to, and due to the grants the airlines can offer the complete route for (relatively) cheap. So, for example, it might be expensive to fly New York to Chicago, but subsidized (and cheaper) to fly New York to Podunk via Chicago. But if lots of travelers catch wind of this, and pretend to go to Podunk only to get off at Chicago, then the air carrier doesn’t get their subsidy.
You mean no checked baggage, right? Carry-on is fine.
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.
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."
"True free market" does not mean "complete absence of all regulations"!
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.
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.
Where do you live? Your boarding pass is scanned at the gate; you can’t just board any flight with your boarding pass from any other flight
In your scenario, when you fail to board Airplane B that event gets flagged. Not a huge deal but you might have a problem getting a refund. When you try to board Airplane A the fun begins. You will be stopped because the ID for that boarding pass never went through a TSA checkpoint.
What if you go back through TSA again, this time with the other boarding pass? They only check IDs now, so you'd need a second ID that also had your picture on it. Drivers licences were easy to forge 20 years ago. Not so much now, especially with the RealID mandate.
Even then it wouldn't work because TSA has face recognition now. If you try to go through a second time with a different ID but a similar face on the same day, you will almost certainly be detained and probably arrested.
Good luck.
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.
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've never intentionally skiplagged, but there was one time the first leg of my journey was late, I missed my connection and I was going to be in the airport for 8 or 10 hours to catch my 1 hour flight to my final destination. I decided not to, and instead minimized my misery and bought a ticket for the 3.5 hour train ride home.
If an airline looked at that behavior and blacklisted me for not using the service I paid for, then they are the greedy fucking bastards.
The part about skipplagging causing scheduling issues for deadhead is irrelevant as it doesn’t actually cause scheduling issues, the crew will deadhead on the path they were always planned to do and skiplagging does not affect that.
Airlines could make these problems go away if they charged a consistent fee for each hop, but they decide to instead hang super shitty itineraries over your head hoping you will shell out more money so you don’t have to sleep on a bench in JFK.
Maybe air travel should be treated like a utility where you pay for transit between locations and the airlines need to offer a fixed cost for those transits. The prices can of course fluxuate based upon demand and other external factors like fuel prices, wages. But the airline should not be able to charge different prices based upon where you are coming from and where you are going, or what IP address you bought the tickets from, or your nationality, etc.
I understand that this will most likely make multi hop travel more expensive and single hop travel less expensive, and I think that is a worthwhile tradeoff.
Speaking of the environment, imagine if people could take single hop flights more often because they are cheaper than shittier multi hop itineraries. Right now people will take routes which are much less fuel efficient and much worse for the environment because the tickets are cheaper.
Now you just have a no-show at the gate (P>50% ? something they’re surely used to handle efficiently) giving them some slack to fly their overbook flight without having to bump anyone. Truly a win-win
> Because they cause a truly stupid amount of inefficiencies and hassle with their desire to save a buck at the cost of everyone else.
This is almost entirely self-inflicted. If the airlines stopped treating people who attempt to cancel a single leg of an itinerary like borderline criminals and instead actually gave an incentive (even a small one) to cancel in advance, this problem would mostly go away.
Seriously, I’ve replaced a leg in the middle of a trip with ground transportation due to a delay, and, if I try to call the airline and tell them I’ll be missing that leg, I (a) get yelled at, (b) am threatened with cancellation of the next leg, and (c) have a heck of a time getting the airline not to follow through with (b).
If I were flying a hidden city route under these terms, I would fully understand the desire to simply no-show.
If I were involved in making regulation, I wound seriously consider requiring airlines to allow passengers to cancel single legs, with one hour notice, without penalty. Let the airlines figure out how to make it work. Charge $200 to reroute bags if needed. And, damn it, require the airline to give a partial refund if the passenger is skipping a leg because it was late (or because the previous leg was late).
We shouldn't accept arbitrary restrictions from stupid megacorps.
I studied Aviation engineering with Pilot studies and am also a frequent flyer, idgaf if someone skiplags.
If a seat on a plane is empty it literally doesn't make a difference to my life as my ass is on another seat. If the empty seat is next to mine then actually that's amazing.
> This all causes problems for people on the ground
As much as delayed connection or missing passenger, they're trained to do this and it's their job to do so. They're not especially annoyed or insulted if it's due to skiplags. Also your assumption is that the person skiplagging checked in baggage which is beyond idiotic to do and to assume.
> logistics team scheduling
ops doesn't sit there and cry waiting for 1 single skiplagger with no checked bags. You know what the solution to this is actually? The airlines to allow it so then they are informed of no-shows beforehand. Simple.
> means the airline flies an empty seat that should have been occupied, wasting fuel
As I said before, if airlines allowed people to be open about their intentions to skiplag then that can be taken into account during W&B. Also 1 or 2 people skiplagging doesn't make a significant dent in fuel burn throughout the flight. Wait till you learn about how aircraft have enough fuel on board to divert - further wasting fuel!! Safety factors are destroying the environment!
> If you engage in skiplagging, you are sincerely a greedy fucking bastard and deserve every blacklisting you get.
Have you considered that people may have legitimate reasons to skiplag? i.e they cannot afford the full fare, they cannot make the following flight for other reasons?
Skip laggers are not uniquely annoying pax, most of your complaints can be made of people who fly for cheap using points - probably an even more collective nuisance. Being on a megacorps side against consumers is strange behaviour.
If this is impacting their margins so dearly, they should incentivize for optimizing against it: nobody would ever take a skiplagged flight if there were no pricing penalty.
> If you engage in skiplagging, you are sincerely a greedy fucking bastard
But the airline isn't greedy for this type of pricing, right?
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.
Their argument is complete nonsense that they could have sold the seat for more because it’s just as valid if you actually took the flight.
It’s like them taking action against you because you booked in advance and they decided they could have charged you more. WTF?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Price discrimination is a selling strategy that charges customers different prices for the same product or service based on what the seller believes it can get the customer to agree to. In pure price discrimination, the seller charges each customer the maximum price they will pay. In more common forms of price discrimination, the seller segments customers into groups based on certain attributes and charges each group a different price.
Airlines famously work on razor thin margins. If they dont make their $ this way they need to charge more for the NYC full fare, and because all competitors do it it pushes those fares up. Which might be OK but what this means is skippers make it worse for people who legit follow the terms and conditions
My belief is people should honour the terms of the fare they paid for.
As for a parachute. That is silly. Of course that would add a lot of cost. A similar example is asking a bus driver to stop outside your house. Or let you jump out the open door. Lots of insurance and liability reasons not to do so.
The fact that fuel is the only aspect to a fare is obviously misinformed. It is like saying AWS only pay for data centre electricity.
