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.

Comments

Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[SuperKendall]

What if you needed to go somewhere else because of an emergency? Should you really be forced to take every leg of a flight you have booked?

If they don't want people getting off midway through a series of flights, maybe try not pricing an entire trip with multiple legs less than the individual flight to the city in the middle. Their own byzantine pricing system is what led to this result.

If they were smart they'd take advantage of such travelers and allow them to cancel some of the legs after booking, as a way to illuminate pricing errors in the system. Then they'd have an open seat someone else could fill as well. Win -Win.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[lgw]

This passenger behavior is just a form of arbitrage. The airlines have created unequal markets for point-to-point travel, and some clever people are taking advantage. Arbitrage is as old as markets, is never going away, and almost always benefits consumers.

The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market, but I don't see them having much luck with that in Europe. They'd have better luck buying a Senate committee here in the US.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Nidi62]

If they don't want people getting off midway through a series of flights, maybe try not pricing an entire trip with multiple legs less than the individual flight to the city in the middle. Their own byzantine pricing system is what led to this result.

It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities. The airlines may be giving up a revenue premium to generate demand in the other city to help offset the loss that would otherwise occur. This goes for smaller airports as well that may have government subsidies to increase access for smaller markets: to drive up demand in those markets you offer connecting tickets that might be cheaper than flights originating out of a hub.

The simple matter is, if airlines are offering a cheaper ticket to a connecting destination that they would had you terminated somewhere, they are needing to drive traffic to that destination for some reason. Skipping out halfway through a connection can also cause increased costs for the airline having to track/reroute bags, etc. And then of course in today's climate there's the security/safety angle as well. Say you bail on the last leg and the plane goes down. The airline still thinks you are on board (especially if it was a through flight with no equipment change). If the government finds out you left the flight and there's an accident, you immediately become a target of suspicion.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really convinced on your last part. They scan tickets as you're boarding a flight, so would know if you weren't on it in the case of an accident.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Nidi62]

I'm not really convinced on your last part. They scan tickets as you're boarding a flight, so would know if you weren't on it in the case of an accident.

On through flights passengers are not forced to deplane and reboard, they generally stay on the plane, so tickets are not rescanned.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[sobachatina]

Airlines do everything in their power to cheat the customer. Just look at the overbooking practices.
Customers have almost no recourse.

This guy didn't "cheat the system" he bought a flight and didn't take it. Are you honestly suggesting that he is morally obligated to consume the seat he purchased? Do you also think that if you don't finish your meal the restaurant can sue you?

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Anonymous Coward]

>The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market

Or they re trying to give attention to the trial so people dont do it by fear of getting sued.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I don't approve of this guys behavior, these tricks to cheat the system, normally always end up making us pay more.

I approve of it. For one thing he isn't cheating the system. For a car analogy, guy paid for a 7-day rental but returned the car on day 5 and did not request reimbursement for the remaining 2 days.

If paying for something, not using it, and not requesting a refund somehow results in other people paying more for that thing, that is a seriously broken system and I cannot understand how you can defend it.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Anonymous Coward]

This passenger behavior is just a form of arbitrage.

Don't you mean airbitrage?

I'll see myself out ...

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Cederic]

they are needing to drive traffic to that destination for some reason

Maybe so, but buying an airline ticket in no way obliges you to use it.

If anything you're saving them money through improved efficiency (fewer bags/people to board/disembark), greater safety (fewer people stampeding through an exit in an emergency), a superior experience for their other customers (more elbow room, fewer distractions for the cabin crew) and lower fuel costs because the aircraft is lighter.

Shit, they should be paying him.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Aighearach]

The skipping out part is the issue.

OK, so don't use the word "skip" as a pejorative, and the whole problem is solved! Wow, that was easy. They didn't "skip out," they "went somewhere else because they enjoy Freedom."

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Idarubicin]

because A) your luggage B) where did we lose this person C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct. D) is there a security risk to the plane.

A) your luggage This trick doesn't work with checked bags, since airlines tend to check bags through to the final destination. Hidden-city travel is a strictly carry-on-only tactic.

B) where did we lose this person They know where they lost you, since they scanned your boarding pass when you boarded the first flight, and they didn't scan your boarding pass at the gate for the connecting flight.

C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct This is the only potentially obnoxious consequence--some airlines may delay a flight by a few minutes to allow a "lost" passenger to get to the gate. But if an airline has a takeoff slot they're not going to give it up to recover one wayward traveller. And they do a headcount of passengers on board before every flight anyway--if it matches the count they get from the scanned boarding passes, they're good to go.

D) is there a security risk to the plane Nope. They know that you and your carry-on were on the first plane, but that makes you no more dangerous to that aircraft than any other passenger. They know that you're not on the second plane, since you and your carry-on never boarded. They know you don't have a checked bag in the hold.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[Solandri]

The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market

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.

Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on

[superdave80]

"Flying half-empty is not efficiency, quite the contrary. You're wasting more fuel per passenger because of the fixed costs, such as the weight of the plane itself."

We aren't talking about flights half full because only half the tickets are sold. We are talking about flights FULLY paid for, but the passenger isn't there. It's no different than if a passenger doesn't show up for some reason. The airline still gets their money. And they may have a chance to sell that same seat again.

the airlines built, they need to suck it up

[Bugler412]

Airlines build a pricing system that enables this sort of behavior then blames the customer for using it?

Re:the airlines built, they need to suck it up

[The Original CDR]

It's a form of "gaming the system" that can cost someone else money. When the Sacagawea $1 coin first came out, people could use their credit card to order direct from the U.S. Mint. Some people figured out that they could accumulate points on their credit card by purchasing the coins, depositing the coins at the bank, and paying off the balance on their credit card. Do that enough times you could get a free vacation to Hawaii. That practice was soon put to an end by the U.S. Mint, as that was not how they wanted the coins to be circulated in the economy. The only time I see those coins is when I get change from a government vending machine.

Re:the airlines built, they need to suck it up

[Anonymous Coward]

the airlines should take a tip from the mint then and end their insane pricing practices. notice the mint didn't sue anyone for perfectly legal activity just because it wasn't what they wanted. they where the ones to change not the customer.

Re:the airlines built, they need to suck it up

[TheCastro1689]

It was a short lived scam, the real issue was that they government didn't stop printing paper dollars.

Re:the airlines built, they need to suck it up

[Roger W Moore]

It's a form of "gaming the system" that can cost someone else money.

How? Provided the passenger had no checked bags (which would be really hard to get back so I doubt this was the case) there is no way that not taking a flight results in a higher cost to the airline, in fact the exact opposite is going to be true since they can save on fuel.

As I understand it an air ticket is a contract you purchase from the airline that they will transport you between two locations on a certain set of flights. You have not promised that you will take the flights you have merely purchased the right to take those flights. If you decide at any point not to take a flight then, while you forfeit the cost of the ticket, there is nothing they can do. If not then this would mean that, in addition to forcing you to buy another ticket, the airline could sue any passenger who failed to turn up for even the start of a flight e.g. due to traffic delays etc. Good luck to any airline that starts doing that!

Their growl has no bite

[FeelGood314]

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.

Re:Their growl has no bite

[stealth_finger]

They still got paid the asking price, what does it matter if the passenger is actually there or not? Surely if anything that would save the airline a tiny bit of fuel costs.

What?

[bigpat]

Seriously... what? So an airline gets someone to pay for a ticket and they save the airline money by not taking up space and weight... presumably someone could have flown on standby also so there is potential for the airline to double dip if someone doesn't show up for their flight... and they are pissed 'cause their pricing model didn't account for people who might want to actually go to the layover city. They aren't losing money by someone paying for, but not fully utilizing the service. The airlines should be liable for court costs plus penalty if they pull this shit.

Re:What?

[squiggleslash]

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...

Re: What?

[Miamicanes]

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.

I fail to see the problem.

[acoustix]

In my experience many flights are overbooked (which I think is an asshole move by the airline). The passenger paid for a ticket and then didn't use it? How are they losing money? Either the seat is empty for the last leg of the flight, saving the airline on fuel. Or the airline can resell the seat or give it to an overbooked passenger.

If the airlines are going the legal route for this BS, then just wait for an onslaught of justified passenger lawsuits by of crappy industry practices.

So, what are the airline's damages?

[uncqual]

The airline saved money on fuel by not hauling the passenger and his luggage on the last leg. Perhaps, they even filled that seat with a last minute full-fare standby passenger. Even if they were legally correct, what damages did they incur by the passenger breaching their contract?

Re:So, what are the airline's damages?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Also, what performance did the passenger fail to perform? He paid money in exchange for a seat on an airplane. Doesn't sound like he wanted a refund or anything, he paid his money, then chose not to avail himself of the service.

New tactic: sue your customers.

[fredrated]

What could go wrong?

Airline's simply sqeezing every dime they can

[Lucas123]

Airlines charge you for food, for blankets for baggage (believe it or not, they never used to). Like banks, which now earn more through fees than interest or investments with your money, Airlines are basing more and more of their revenue on fees. So, here we have an airline upset that they couldn't squeeze one more passenger into a seat on a flight.

Hey, Lufthansa, the passenger paid for the flight; it's not your prerogative to force him/her to take every leg.

I hope the court rules against the airline.

Destination tax workaround

[Pimpy]

It's their own fault for artificially inflating prices based on the route rather than the costs incurred. Travelling from Munich to Brussels for example often costs as much as an overseas flight, while the same route with a layover in Brussels and a termination in Amsterdam costs 1/4 the price. If they wish to gouge people based on what they think someone is willing to pay, it is no surprise that people find workarounds.

They have already tried tactics like refusing to let you board your return flight if you didn't complete all the legs on the outbound, which is now also being challenged in court.

Overbooking means he should be rewarded

[mykepredko]

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?

This makes no sense?

[Roger W Moore]

It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities.

Your argument makes absolutely zero sense. If they flew an empty plane then they would make no passenger revenue for that flight. However, by reducing the cost of a ticket when the passenger flies an additional leg they will actually now have negative revenue because the passenger is paying less than they would have if they had got a ticket just to the hub.

Your scenario provides motivation for not adding anything to the cost of the ticket to fly the extra leg (they are going to fly the plane anyway and the extra convenience might attract more passengers) but your argument provide no economic reason to reduce the cost of the ticket for flying an extra leg. I suspect the difference is because a different destination is a different market with different competitive pressures. So really it is just the airline trying to screw more money out of people staying near a hub because they know they will pay it.

They also don't like trip nesting

[Strider-]

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"

Re:That's not just a "scenario"

[hawguy]

This is actually how airports set up their runway schedules. There's a set number of departure and arrival slots and if an airline starts missing the slot they risk loosing it - so to preserve those slots they'll straight up run empty flights. It's similar to back when they had limited international phone lines - big companies would pay people to read books over a connection so they could hold the line so they wouldn't have to wait for it to become available again when they needed to make an urgent call.

The other reason they run empty or near empty planes is because if that plane doesn't make it to the destination, then it's not going to be able to make its next scheduled flight.

But none of this is the passenger's concern - if I paid for a connecting flight, the airline is getting the same revenue from me whether I get on it or not, but they are saving a little money in fuel and other costs when I don't get on.

Re:This has always been stupid

[DamnRogue]

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.