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Judge Tosses United Airlines Lawsuit Over 'Hidden City' Tickets
An anonymous reader writes: United Airlines lost a legal round in its effort to stop a website that helps people find 'hidden city' ticket pairs. The airline, along with online travel site Orbitz, sued New York-based Skiplagged.com and its founder, Aktarer Zaman, in November seeking an injunction to stop the site from sending users to Orbitz to purchase United tickets. A federal judge ruled Thursday that Illinois isn't the proper venue for the carrier's claims.
All this ruling does is make them go back and file it in the appropriate venue. And while that's the right thing to do from a legal standpoint, it will have basically no bearing on the case when it is filed again in the appropriate location. This doesn't address the merits of the case (or lack thereof) in any way.
You're a fucking airline. You're going where I need to go and I bought a ticket. If I'm not on the plane for the second half of the trip, you've saved that much on fuel. Fuck off.
For one thing, the tickets capture seats that will go unused, and an airline would have no way to sell those unused seats.
So they're arguing that because the customer doesn't use a seat they paid for thus preventing them from reselling it to someone else that they can't resell it to someone else.
What?
or if you set the timer to go off on the leg from ORD to LAX but get off at ORD and don;t mention the baggage. If I were the airline, I'd be using the necessity to resolve that conundrum as the basis for my complaint, not some rubbish about not being able to sell the same seat twice.
Nullius in verba
I've never understood why they won't transfer me to an otherwise empty seat on an earlier flight when I happen to be early for a connection. It would seem to be in their best interest to fill up the planes and push the "empty seat" to a later flight when they have a chance of selling it, but they never do offer me a free change, they always want to charge me an extra $50, so I just get a soda and wait it out.
They used to do that, I used have no problem fly standby on an earlier flight when I got there early. But then I guess they found out that it's convenient for passengers so it's something that they need to charge for because no one should get anything for free when flying.
What do you mean? They did sell that seat: to me, as part of a trip I paid for, and at the price they thought was fair. If I choose to not use part of what I paid for, well, I still paid for it.
The airline's complaint would be like me going to a restaurant, ordering the steak&potatoes but only eating the steak, and the restaurant complaining this should be illegal because they could've made more money selling the (wasted) potatoes to someone else.
I am not a sig.
Nobody should be required to buy into loss leaders or other pricing schemes like this.
And now they're taking a page out of the BSA's lawyer playbook with this "lost revenue" crap. Just because someone could have bought a $500 ticket from NY to SLC doesn't mean that $100 was stolen from United because they bought a $400 ticket that was NY to LA with a layover in SLC.
And then there's airline pricing in general. I always have a hard time feeling sorry for the airlines, but when the price of oil (the biggest expense for them) dropped like a rock end of last year, did the airlines lower ticket prices or remove fuel surcharges? Nope.
Big companies like airlines have used obscure and convoluted pricing schemes for decades as a way to screw over the average customer. Seeing them get thrown back into their faces isn't illegal -- it's a sweet dose of justice.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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So they don't want to fund a project that benefits bigotry. Thanks. I like them more now.