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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.
I guess this works with carry-on only. Or is there some way to get checked luggage at the layover?
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I'm guessing that due to economies of scale, the more popular and longer routes are run more, so since there's more of them and more competition, they drive the prices down on them. The shorter in-between flights aren't as popular so they are more "Specialized" and cost more?
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Because airlines make more profit this way (assuming that not too many people know how to exploit it).
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.
It has always existed, and people and companies have always used it. All the airlines want to do is to make it more difficult to find it. If they really want to stop the practice, they could charge full fare for the popular segments and refund the money if the less popular options are actually exercised. They are not doing it that way. It is clear they want to accept it with a wink-and-a-nod to the savvy passengers and make the hurried and less informed passengers to pay a little more.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
Nonetheless, the 22 year old founder cannot weather the legal storm that the duo of billion dollar corporations can wage out of petty cash.
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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.
In Soviet USA you get sued for competing, rewarded for mono/duo-poly.
they can make the problem vanish overnight - Stop making the system itself a game.
That wouldn't work, unless they all do it at the same time.
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.
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.
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".
To give an example. British Airways were doing some aggressive promotions to get Scandinavian business for US flights last summer, which they route through their hub at Heathrow. I was able to get flights from Oslo to LA and back from Ontario to Copenhagen for ~$310 economy return. The same flights starting in London would have cost considerably more because they weren't discounting UK business at that time.
I understand why the airlines price flights this way, and it benefits some consumers by reducing the cost of some flights. Yet the easily exploited flaw is a flaw of the business practice, not the consumer. If some consumers exploit it, there is no good reason to hold them accountable. It was the business' decision after all to use this practice, not the consumer's. If too many consumers exploit the practice, then the business should change the practice.
Put in other terms, using the courts to enforce the practice places too much control of a product or service that the consumer paid for into the hands of the vendor. Consumer's wouldn't be very happy if business told them they couldn't resell a product at a profit just because they bought it when there was a good sale, or if they couldn't split a meal because they bought the larger dish instead of two smaller ones. Why should they be happy about being told that they must use all of the tickets for a flight?
It was a few years ago... but when we adopted my youngest son, I had to get him a ticket to get back to the states after we completed the adoption in Africa. Our tickets were $3600 each round trip. The price was insane, but that was at the hight of gas prices and we were landing in the middle of no-where... and the flight back was literally on Christmas day. The perfect storm of airline gouging. Then I went to buy by kids 1 way ticket... $4500!!! He was flying back with us, on the same plane and it was almost $1000 more for his kids ticket. So I started taking up a collection from the family... the plane fair was going to be about 1/3rd of the total adoption and we hadn't planned on it being that insane. Then a relative of mine said the obvious... buy the kid a round trip ticket to... he'd just not be on the plane on the way there. I called the airline and sure enough that was a legitimate plan. How stupid is that?
Next time I'm taking a boat.
It's not guaranteed that the consumer will benefit from a predictable pricing structure. Without any flexibility to set the rates, fewer airlines will be able to play to game, and you'd end up with less competition in the end. Now, at least the average flyer on popular routes can benefit from low prices, subsidized by business travellers on shorter hops. And smart travellers can now play the game too.
They problem with the utility model is that some of us rely on others paying more so our fares can be lower. Our costs would go up, we wouldn't fly, pushing fares up even more...
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It must be an American thing. In Europe you pay per leg of the travel and you can fly one way between all major airports for 50$.
Because, like any sane business, airlines price according to demand and not just costs.
The idea isn't to buy a ticket to your destination that has layovers. The idea is to buy a ticket to an unpopular (and hence cheap) destination that happens to have a layover at where you want to go. And then you simply "miss" your connection.
You have it backwards. The cheaper flight is A->C. The expensive flight is A->B. This is because there is MORE demand for A->B. It's kind of counter intuitive.
The majority of most people in most fields are morons. An enormous bureaucracy does not insulate against that fact, and may often provide a large degree of protection. However, it may be that their moronic set of countless rules and factors makes prices essentially random white noise, and that random white noise is better than any coherent strategy, which would mean that their success is actually DUE to them being morons that make a decent RNG.
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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.
That is how we got the F'ed up pricing structure in the first place, its legacy. There was a mortal fear among the pols that if certain parts of the country did not receive good airline service they would basically die.
A 737 on up can go from point-to-point pretty much anywhere in the lower 48. The airlines make their money two ways charging a premium for non-stops on popular routes like JFK->LAXetc, and second selling higher price tickets for things like JFK->DTW while at the same time filling most of that bird with JFK->DTW->{Someplace more popular} passengers.
I suspect if the airline industry had been left to develop without government intervention in the first place, routes to smaller destinations on the majors would never have been implemented.
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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.
Not for bonus points or miles, but because it was cheaper and provided more convenient flight times. We booked with Delta on the way down and US Air on the way back. It takes a little more work because you're shopping for plane tickets twice, but I'd bet in most cases, it's worth it.
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You're right: the price of (domestic) air travel has nothing to do with expenses or distance. But that's because the cost has very little to do with variable expenses or distance.
The costs of airplane travel are pretty much fixed. It costs basically the same thing whether there is 1 passenger or the plane is full. Given turnover times, there's surprisingly little difference between shorter and longer domestic flights.
It's how most people insure themselves in the short term in case the airline loses their main luggage.
1st dibs on carry on luggage placement in overhead bins.
1st dibs on seats when there isn't assigned seating on the flight.
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Just because the airlines claim to be broke doesn't mean they are. Football teams in the USA also claim they lose money all the time.