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Lufthansa Sues Passenger Who Missed His Flight in an Apparent Bid To Clamp Down on 'Hidden City' Trick (cnn.com)
Airline Lufthansa has sued a passenger, who didn't show up for the last leg of his ticketed journey, in an apparent bid to clamp down on "hidden city" trick. From a report: The practice involves passengers leaving their journey at a layover point, instead of making a final connection. For instance, someone flying from New York to San Francisco could book a cheaper trip 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. According to a court document, an unnamed male passenger booked a return flight from Oslo to Seattle, which had a layover in Frankfurt. The passenger used all legs of the outbound flight, but did not catch the Frankfurt to Oslo return flight. He instead flew on a separate Lufthansa reservation from Frankfurt to Berlin. The report adds that a Berlin district court dismissed the case in December last year, but the airline company is now appealing that verdict. Worth noting here that United Airlines has also tried its luck on this front -- to no dice.
This is a huge loss to the industry. Before they could threaten people or at least claim that people must fly the entire route. Once they went to court though, they actually had to prove it and in losing more people will use the "hidden city" work around. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the airlines. Many of their tricks to determine how much I will pay for a flight are morally questionable.
From their point of view, if they'd forced the customer to buy the direct ticket, the customer would have had to pay more. So from their point of view, yeah, they're losing money.
I have two responses to that: (1) Fuck them. (2) Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuucccckkk them.
Yeah, I hate airlines. I'm 6'2" so of course I do.
I don't see that they have a leg to stand on. Which is great, because with no legs perhaps the case will be able to fit in one of their own seats.
I suspect the real purpose of the case is intimidation. But the reality is it'll give publicity to methods to save money on plane travel, while simultaneously reminding people that airlines are trash and that there are more comfortable alternatives.
What I'd actually though like to see is the courts not merely forcing the airlines to pay the costs of the lawsuits, but also setting a precedent where the customer can ask for his money back for the original flight because the customer never got to their destination...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I agree totally, since airlines basically always (I think the OP was generous in saying "many flights" are) overbook then isn't somebody doing this actually providing the airline with an opportunity to avoid a negative experience for another customer?
And, if this is the case, shouldn't the customer be rewarded rather than sued?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It was a short lived scam, the real issue was that they government didn't stop printing paper dollars.
Scam implies that something illegal was taking place, but that wasn't the case. The Mint made something available for sale, the credit card companies offered points, and the banks accepted the coins as legal tender. It was a clever way to accumulate points that took advantage of certain incentives offered, nothing more, nothing less.
I once needed to be in Europe twice within a three week period for two different clients. As I booked my travel, I noticed that I could book Europe->North America fares a lot cheaper than North America -> Europe, and also that if I stayed at least 1 weekend, the trip was also much cheaper. So what I did was book the bookends of the two trips on one fare (round trip NA->EU->NA) then booked a second trip (EU->NA->EU) in the middle so I could come home.
It all went off pretty well when I flew it, and I saved a significant chunk of my employer's money with the trick. A couple of months later, though, I got a nastygram from the Airline chastising me for violating the fare rules. Given that I was a 100k frequent flyer at the time, I replied back, CC'ing the appropriate people in the frequent flyer program that I didn't appreciate the tone of their letter, and that had I known it would have been a problem, i would have hapily either stayed in Europe for the 5 days, or booked it on another airline, thereby denying them the revenue of the additional flight.
I later got an apology, and a token amount of miles to "make things right"
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Except this does't quite work in pricing.
For shits and giggles, I just priced out a small airport to small airport, connecting at a large hub, one way trip:
SCE - PHL - ABE
Flight plan:
Depart SCE @ 6:11AM, land In PHL @ 7:08AM
Depart PHL @ 8:15AM, land in ABE @ 9:12AM
Cost of ticket on American Airlines: $210
Now let's just do SCE - PHL
Flight plan:
Depart SCE @ 6:11AM, land in PHL @ 7:08AM
Cost of ticket on American Airlines: $447
That's $237 less, or a savings of 53%. Just how much per person is being subsidized to an extremely large, national airline, even if it's from a smaller sub partner?
I can tell you the actual flights are flowing by Piedmont Airlines as American Eagle...
Just to add... AFAIK, the ONLY regularly-scheduled passenger service between the US & Europe is The Queen Mary. I think it averages a round trip between NY and Southhampton every 3-4 weeks, is ASTRONOMICALLY expensive, and takes 8-10 days each way.
Cruise ships make similar trips as repositioning cruises, but usually just once per year each way (ex: NCL moves a few ships from Florida to Europe in the spring, and brings them back in the fall). THOSE cruises are cheap per-day... but long & boring. Minimal live entertainment, lots of maintenance work during the crossing, and generally no/poor internet access. In the Caribbean, they have a combination of terrestrial LTE and satellite spot-beam service... mid-atlantic, they have the equivalent of one 64kbps dialup line to share among ALL the passengers.
Side note about slow connectivity in general: anything that involves https, SSH, or a VPN is unlikely to work unless you use it in the middle of the night when nobody else is using it, because TLS handshaking enforces timeouts for MITM protection that are only slightly longer than the time required to transmit the handshake at ~19.2kbps. (TLS basically enforces a timeout that's long enough to permit handshaking over a direct point-to-point 9600 baud connection between a credit card terminal & server, but even tcp/ip + wifi overhead is enough to cause a timeout at 14.4kbps, or a single retransmitted packet at 19.2kbps).
It's not your imagination that web sites that USED to crawl on congested phone networks now don't work AT ALL under the same conditions. 10 years ago, almost nothing used https. Now, nearly everything does. So it's easy for a congested, shared network to get itself into a state where nobody can do ANYTHING. It's a use case that wasn't unforeseen, but whose consequences were underestimated 20 years ago because back then, nobody envisioned using https for literally everything. Also, a single ad-funded web page can EASILY initiate dozens of https handshakes, because every affiliate link & ad requires its own separately-negotiated connection. Google tried to mitigate the problem with SPDY, but I think someone discovered a major exploit in the protocol a year or two ago, forcing them to scrap the whole thing and go back to the drawing board.
Not really... it is about charging a premium on hub-hub routes to subsidize the cost of more price sensitive outlying city-hub routes. The game makes the aviation market "fairer" for everyone. For the airline, it also dis-incentivizes taking flights in banks that are well timed for onward connections.-- go earlier or later and maybe the hub-hub flight is cheaper.
But, when you are the flier, you might as well do everything you can to get a better deal. The airline isn't looking out for you.
Years ago I had a friend flying to visit family in the UK. The cheapest available ticket flew Atlanta > Houston > Atlanta > London. The airline absolutely insisted that he fly Atlanta > Houston > Atlanta instead of getting on in the middle.
Stupidity all around.
This is business. In the same way that they are maximizing their profits and inconveniencing their customers by overbooking flights.
It's not a hack, a scam, or a trick. It's simply underflying. You overbook. We underfly.
And I can't imagine that this happens often enough to warrant new laws, or lawsuits. Unless you ask a lawyer, then by all means drop your soul off at the door and let's get to it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's not regulatory capture which distorts the market. It's a quasi-monopoly. The places I've seen this behavior (missing a leg of a flight) benefit passengers most is at airports where one airline dominates - a hub. Back when Northwest was still around, Detroit was one of their hubs. Something like 80% of all the flights in and out of Detroit were Northwest. That reduced competition meant that Northwest had undue influence over the pricing for tickets in and out of Detroit. They exploited that to charge excessively high prices for tickets starting and ending in Detroit.
But because Detroit was their hub, that meant a ton of flights between other cities made stopovers in Detroit to change planes. The other cities had plenty of competition so their fares were priced a lot closer to the airline's cost. That's what creates the opportunity for people to book flights between different cities at a lower price, and get off at Detroit (missing the last leg). So it's not strictly arbitrage per se, it's just bypassing the airline's quasi-monopoly pricing at a particular airport. (Higher pricing at airports with competition are usually due to fees charged by the different airports. e.g. Flights to/from Los Angeles International are cheaper than to/from Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or Orange County because the same agency operates all those airports but charges the lowest fees for LAX.)
I used a similar tactic to visit my sister for free when she was at the University of Michigan, and I was in Boston. Whenever I flew home to visit my parents in California, I'd book a flight with a layover in Detroit, and deliberately maximize the layover time (which gave me about 4 hours there). My sister would meet me at the airport, we'd go out and have a meal together and talk and catch up, and I'd take any presents she wanted me to bring my parents.
I've only visited Boston but I've lived in California and I think that you got the two shitholes mixed up. It certainly is a sacrifice to raise your kids in California though. You weren't wrong about that. My favorite thing was the homeless shit all over the public parks.