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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.
Too bad it was just a procedural dismissal due to wrong venue and not due to the merits of the case.
United said such ticketing schemes violate its fare rules. For one thing, the tickets capture seats that will go unused, and an airline would have no way to sell those unused seats
Well, actually, they already *have* sold those seats -- to the person that bought the ticket and decided not to use the rest of it. But it's not true that they have no way to sell those seats -- if the flight is overbooked or full, then they'll fill the unused seat with a bumped or standby passenger. But if they want to be able to sell that seat before departure time, all they have to do is give the ticket holder a way to cancel that leg of the bookng, perhaps refunding a small percentage of the purchase price as an incentive to do so.
So it's not true that they have no way to sell the seats, they just don't want to do it.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
This has similarities to what I saw in inkjet printers many years ago. For a while, they were selling printers at a big discount because they would make their money on the replacement ink cartridges. Problem was the new printers came with a new full color and black cartridge and cost less than it cost to buy the two cartridges individually. It was actually cheaper to buy a new printer, take the cartridges out of the boxes, and throw away the printer, than it was to buy replacement cartridges. Same thing here - it is sometimes cheaper to buy more of a trip than you need then throw away part of it you don't need.
Regarding the cartridges, due to a couple issues that came up, such as this one, they started including cartridges that were 1/2 to 1/3 full with new printers.
I've done that to United, even got in an argument with the CS person on the phone. UA tried to charge me a $200 fee to change my return flight home on a round trip ticket that only cost me $227 total. I simply bought another one way ticket home for $125 and told CS I am not cancelling my original ticket out of spite. He said I had to if I did not intend to use it because it was a violation of the sale terms. Oh well. I even checked in for that flight just to screw them more. I paid for it so why not.