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United and Orbitz Sue 22-Year-Old Programmer For Compiling Public Info
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.
Gate check your large bag, you'll get it back at the arriving gate.
Besides, the cost of checking a bag undoes most of the savings to be had with this method anyway.
I don't see this working with round trip tickets; many airlines cancel the rest of your itinerary with no refund if you no-show for a leg...
TFA says it works only for carry-on, and one-way tickets since you'd need to board a return flight at the destination you booked.
That really limits the utility for me; rarely do I fly somewhere and not want to get back home. If I was making a permanent move, I'd probably have luggage.
Flights to resort locations are cheaper than major business destinations. Business travelers will pay more to fly since they're spending corporate money instead of their own while vacationers are stingy. Somehow this works even though that vacation resort requires a layover in a hub at a popular business destination.
I had a friend fly in to visit me once who found that fairs to Atlantic City were hundreds less than Newark.
Why would this ever be cheaper?
Because the price of (domestic) air travel has nothing to do with expenses or distance, and everything to do with marketing games.
First, how many people want to go from NY to LA or vice-versa every day? Getting as big of a slice of that pie as possible matters more than getting a few extra bucks for the ticket. How many people want to go from NY or LA to Detroit, however? Probably not anywhere near as many; But, if you fly Delta, you will pay less to stop in Detroit for a connector than you will for a direct flight. So... Just don't catch the connector. Simple as that!
You can verify this for yourself - Go to any of the major travel search sites and pick a random longish trip with one layover. Now compare the price of that longer trip against the cost of flying directly to the layover city - It will almost always cost significantly more.
If the airlines don't want people to find ways to game the system, they can make the problem vanish overnight - Stop making the system itself a game. Turn air travel into a "utility" model, with a sane, predictable pricing structure (something like $X per mile plus $Y per individual flight, plus any applicable passenger class upcharges). Instead, the entire industry would rather piss around with games and "loyalty" programs and such.
Because air line ticket pricing makes no sense. Literally. I fly a lot (as in somewhere around 100K miles a year) and ticket pricing is pretty absurd. A one-way ticket can sometimes cost 3x what a round trip does to the same destination. Flying from my home airport (a small regional destination) can sometimes lower the price of the ticket, even though I fly one extra leg and 100 miles to a major airport.
United is by far the worst of the price abusers; one reason I no longer fly United. The last time I needed to make a route change, they wanted to charge me $250 for the change, and $1200 for the "additional fare". I bought a one-way on American for $350. Of course, walking away from the second leg is "against ticket policy" so as a good drone I was supposed to cough up $1450 to United.
In my experience no other airline gouges its customers as badly as United when it comes to these sorts of policies, so it does not surprise me that they are on this lawsuit. They are also on the bottom of nearly every customer satisfaction survey; maybe the two are related? Anyone at United listening? Hello?
I can't ship a 40 lb bag from Arizona to Maine cheaper than checking it. Word.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is just about the most selfish, self-centered, obnoxious behavior I can imagine. I was a passenger on one of these flights in October. Our departure from SFO was delayed by 30 minutes because a "through" passenger was missing. Sure, *you* get a cheaper ticket, as the cost of inconveniencing the airline and 150 other people. This asshat shouldn't just be sued by the airlines; I'd be willing to join a class-action suit. If you want to try this crap, you better make sure it's not just a layover--that it's a plane change, and you *don't* check in for that last leg. Or, on return, that you only check in at the point where you actually plan to board.
Because, like any sane business, airlines price according to demand and not just costs.
tortious.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Gate check your large bag, you'll get it back at the arriving gate.
This is incorrect - When you gate-check a bag it's "checked through to your final destination" - You pick it up on the baggage carousel.
The exception is regional-jet and turboprop flights where you "leave your bag in the jetway." In these situations your bag is returned to the jetway.
I work in the industry, and actually in most instances there is no difference in gate check bags. They simply send them down to the ground crew and it is loaded like any checked bag. It would be exceptionally costly to try and separate and sort bags that need to be "returned at the gate" so they don't bother and send them up the claim units at your final destination. The tags are just hand written (sometimes they slap a ten digit tag on them, but most of their host systems don't even support automatic sorting and tracking for gate checked bags) and read when the plane is unloaded.
Normally, if you gate check a bag they also don't charge you the baggage fee as the most common cause of gate check bags is the overhead bins filling up. This causes the airline to be better off with the customer service aspect and since they generally tell you carry-on bags don't cost they don't want to spring hidden fees on you (unless you fly a budget airline like spirit or frontier, spirit charges you even if you carry the bag onto the plane with you and the charges are HIGHER if it has to be checked at the gate...).
Not exactly. This is something the airlines attempt to stop, as it is a way to circumvent bag fees (they don't generally charge you for a gate check), but especially since many places are moving towards self-service check in or you can check in online and never see an agent this is rare. TSA should be the ones stopping it, but this is not their primary concern (or even secondary, tertiary... etc.). It doesn't incur any cost to the security side and because of the historically bad communications and cooperation between the TSA and airline tenants there is very little quid pro quo going on. I have spoken to a lot of operations managers about this problem before, and watched many people taking obviously large suitcases through security with both TSA and the passenger being very aware that is not of the carry on size.
No. The core problem of the airline industry in the US is that there are too many airlines serving each origin destination pair. Such that no airline is able to maintain a reliably profitable margin before others try to horn in and lower the price for fares.
In an industry where airplanes are very capital intensive and inflexible to acquire/get rid of, and there is very low cost to supplying additional seats to a market, any market participant will be tempted to make marginal costs by putting more availability out there. This depresses ticket prices (to the benefit of the public), but drives their industry into the ground.
Air travel is a great business for everyone except the airlines. If we want to have stable airlines, reasonable prices (which may not mean low prices), and quality service, the harsh truth is that the US will have to let a few airlines die, and not let new entrants take their place. You cannot have all of these things without doing that.
On the topic of this fare exploit, airlines have these rules so they can offer different prices to different markets. If their mechanisms for keeping people from exploiting these differences are disallowed or defeated, I think one predictable outcome is that fares rise for everyone instead.