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.

Comments

'Hidden city' explanation

[QuasiSteve]

Wouldn't have hurt to put this in the summary - who RTFA?

Say you want to fly from NY to Chicago, and that'd cost $300. You can also get a ticket from NY to LA, and that'd cost $250. The catch? That flight from NY to LA also lands in Chicago.
So if you wanted to go from NY to Chicago, you'd be better off buying the NY to LA ticket instead, saving $50.

The airlines don't like this, because if you book NY to LA, they can no longer sell the Chicago to LA seat (except at last minute rates or more often push standby passengers onto that flight) that might normally be $150. So not only are they out $50 on you, they're potentially out an additional $150 on the unsold seat.
( They save a few $ in fuel consumption, food and beverages, etc. )

Presumably the solution would be to not make part-flights more expensive than full-flights to begin with, but I'm sure the bean counters worked out that this is still the more profitable route for them.

As for headline - yeah, it's only tossed out because it's the wrong venue.. there's really no winner or loser, other than the courts who wasted time on a case that they apparently shouldn't have spent any time on at all.

Re:'Hidden city' explanation

[Weirsbaski]

The airlines don't like this, because if you book NY to LA, they can no longer sell the Chicago to LA seat

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.

Fair

[anmre]

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.

Re:Good

[nmb3000]

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.