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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.
Because airlines make more profit this way (assuming that not too many people know how to exploit it).
No, there is no such thing as "strictly prohibited" travel when it comes to airline tickets. They cannot compel you under threat of force to complete your travel under the contract of carriage. You have no such duty to the airline.
Nonetheless, the 22 year old founder cannot weather the legal storm that the duo of billion dollar corporations can wage out of petty cash.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In Soviet USA you get sued for competing, rewarded for mono/duo-poly.
I'll take a crack at this, if someone is in the industry correct me.
Imagine two airline hubs, A and C. Between them is a smaller regional airport B.
Travel between the hubs (Let's use A to C for example) is cheap, relatively speaking, because of the constant demand. The airlines know their flights will always be full, so they can (and must) reduce their prices to a minimum. There is also demand for travel from A to B, and B to C, but it is not necessarily enough to fill a plane. Flying half empty planes is a huge expense, so in order to service this demand, the airline can allow a portion of its A to C traffic to route through B at a discounted rate. These travelers are flying essentially at cost for the airline. This is possible because the higher prices paid by the A to B and B to C travelers will make the profit. The problem comes in that if the A to B regional travelers try to hide in with the A to C crowd, the airline will have to raise the price of the B to C crowd even more if they want to continue flying the route. (They can't raise the A to C price as then nobody would accept the layover and would fly direct instead) Not to mention they are losing opportunities to transport people from B to C, if planes are leaving with seats occupied by phantom travelers.
There's a fair amount of precedent for this sort of idiocy. One of the funniest example, which got a bit of news coverage at the time, was back in the 1970s. The US Defense Department funded a study by a couple of academics, and paid them several hundred thousand dollars to study what could be learned from public sources about US military deployment. After the study's report was submitted, it took only about 2 days for it to be classified as a US government "secret".
The press and the professional comedians had a good time mocking the US government for that one. But various people also pointed out that it wasn't the first time such idiocy had been enforced by law, in the US or in other countries. A long list of similar punishment for making publicly-available information public also appeared back then.
Maybe we can start a thread of other similar recent attempts to suppress public information. Do you know a good one in whatever country you live in?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
That wouldn't work, unless they all do it at the same time.
If only we had some sort of, I dunno, Civil Aeronautics Board that could keep these insolvent assclowns in check.
Yes, fares have technically dropped since deregulation - The GAO found they went down a whopping 9%. Meanwhile, the overall experience of flying has gone from "fun" to "buy two seats if you don't like having 10x the risk of developing a DVT, and enjoy your complimentary three peanuts".
Here in the USA it's all about screwing the traveller.
If this was true, why are the airlines constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with razor-thin margins? They should be rolling in cash, and they're not. Why? Because air travel is hugely competitive and a great deal for the flying public.
Umm, you people seem really dense about this. Of course tickets designed to get you from JFK to LAX and back won't work with Phoenix. If you wanted to do it with JFK->Phoenix, then you need two sets of one way tickets: JFK->Phoenix->elsewhere and Phoenix->JFK->somewhere else. Some airports might be difficult to find connections at, but even a lot of small places get used for small, local connections through some prop plane company affiliated with a larger airline.
And if you haven't checked before, then you might not notice how much cheaper a flight with a connection can sometimes be than a single leg of the same trip. In more than one place I've lived about an hour an half drive from a major airport (e.g. Atlanta and Chicago) and had to compare prices of flying out of a local, small airport versus taking a bus to the large airport for work related flights. I have found that flights to the local smaller airport were cheaper than a direct flight to the major airport, even though the flights to the local airport connected at the major airport to a puddle-jumper plane and used the exact same flight as the multi-leg itinerary. Sometimes it was almost half the price, probably because no one was looking for tickets to the small airport, but many wanted direct flights to the larger one.
If this was true, why are the airlines constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with razor-thin margins?
Maybe their core business is lobbying the government for handouts and subsidies, and they're actually really incompetent at running airlines?
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
they're actually really incompetent at running airlines?
They're *all* incompetent? United? American? Virgin America? Delta? Southwest? JetBlue? Alaska? Spirit? Frontier? Hawaiian? Allegiant? Every single one of them, moving millions of people every week, they're all incompetent at running airlines?
Sorry, I don't buy it.