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United and Orbitz Sue 22-Year-Old Programmer For Compiling Public Info

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-for-making-it-harder-to-squeeze-blood-from-a-stone dept.

linuxwrangler writes: Aktarer Zaman, a young computer scientist, started a "side project" called Skiplagged to compile a relatively well-known method of finding inexpensive airfares. "The idea is that you buy an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination. Say you want to fly from New York to San Francisco — you actually book a flight from New York to Lake Tahoe with a layover in San Francisco and get off there, without bothering to take the last leg of the flight." But organizing fully public information into a user-friendly form has gotten him sued by United and Orbitz. They accuse his not-for-profit site of "unfair competition" and of promoting "strictly prohibited" travel.

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  1. Re:Luggage? by Zmobie · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Thanks for telling me something I already know? I don't work as an airline employee, I work for a major airline/airport vendor that happens to specialize in baggage handling and sortation as our major business. If you really want to insult me and act like I don't know what I am talking about, you should actually know what you're talking about first.

    Yes, there are a few airlines and some circumstance with the puddle jumper aircraft and a few narrow body aircraft where they give the bags back, but that is usually only something that happens at very small tier 2 airports or tier 3 airports that do not have the facilities to handle the industry standard practice of checking to final destination (which is by far and large what most airlines do, we have done work for a ton of the big ones, including the currently three largest). This also far and away does NOT apply to only wide body jets, as several airports I have done work at can barely even support wide body jets on the majority of their gates (LAX specifically comes to mind as it can only really support them on the ends of terminals since the space between terminals is pretty small and at TBIT because it was built with that in mind). That would be just simply idiotic to only apply that practice to certain equipment types as your ground crews would have an even BIGGER pain sorting a narrow body by hand to give bags back because they can't load ULDs on those and everything is put in bulk hold.

    Regional jets are not the money makers and usually have weirdo exceptions especially since a lot of terminals/stations they fly them out of barely have a baggage handling system to begin with.