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Lufthansa Sues Passenger Who Missed His Flight in an Apparent Bid To Clamp Down on 'Hidden City' Trick (cnn.com)

Posted by msmash on from the let-the-game-begin dept.

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.

13 of 502 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by sobachatina · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      This passenger behavior is just a form of arbitrage.

      Don't you mean airbitrage?

      I'll see myself out ...

    5. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by Idarubicin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ~Idarubicin
    6. Re:Seems like they don't have a "leg" to stand on by Solandri · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. the airlines built, they need to suck it up by Bugler412 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. Their growl has no bite by FeelGood314 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. What? by bigpat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. This makes no sense? by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. They also don't like trip nesting by Strider- · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...
  7. Re:That's not just a "scenario" by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.