Judge throws out United Airlines lawsuit against Skiplagged.com founder
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
When you buy that stopover ticket and ditch the connection, you're likely to have gate agents calling over the intercom for you repeatedly while a plane full of passengers could be waiting for you to show up.
I've been in plenty of planes which pushed back a few minutes early after a quick boarding, and it's always a nice change from the typical late departure. The idea of a full plane ready-to-go save for a passenger who had no intention of showing up in the first place doesn't sit well with me.
I've also had plenty of flights where I've timed it wrong and been sprinting to the gate with just under 5 minutes left on the clock. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you miss it. But the more common-place connection dropping becomes, the more likely the airlines are to close that gate at exactly 5 minutes pre-flight even with a checked in passenger unboarded, which makes flying overall just a little bit worse for everyone.
But on the whole, I despise the pricing games that airlines play a lot more than any hack a passenger can come up with to beat them at their own game. Trying to book a flight last week and it seemed like every single time I reran the search the prices were up again another $20. It's definite race-to-the-bottom pricing strategies. I understand that as seats sell the lowest available price changes, but it seems like even existing inventory is being repriced in real time. I think the price for a specific seat should not be changing more than once per 24 hours, or better yet, once per 7 days.
They were. Clear your cookies. Use different browsers. I've found firefox on a Mac yields more expensive tickets than firefox on PC!!! The cheapest setup? Windows XP SP2.
(1)http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/mcgee/2013/04...
If an airline sells a large block of seats or its competitor sells out and is now 99% certain they'll fill the flight at a higher price, why should they be forced to hold the price at the same level just because it's still Tuesday?
That said, we're just at the tip of the iceberg for variable service and variable pricing based on expected customer value and expected customer elasticity. As more of our purchases are made programmatically. and as our identities, purchase patterns, credit records, even personal environmental factors can be taken into account in real-time, free market economics will force companies to adapt pricing models that can effectively exploit each customer's individual maximum utility.
Sometimes the "optimal" economic outcome is not the moral outcome. I'm not sure I like the idea of a world where the price of a Big Mac changes as each personal steps up to the counter and their iris is scanned to determine what they can afford. I think there's some reasonable expectation of privacy to our purchasing history which will work itself out over the next couple decade as the technology gets more advanced, sees more widespread adoption, is rallied against, and eventually regulated to some extent.
Part of the problem is that bad behavior is't often punished by the market to the full extent of the damage it causes. For example, with credit cards, some cards started changing terms so that payments were applied to the lowest interest rate balance versus the highest. It's clearly an "unfair" practice but because most customers of credit card companies don't have a clue about how interest is specifically calculated, the companies that adopted the practice were rewarded with higher profit at the expense of uneducated customers. Soon it became practically necessary for all credit cards to apply payments to lowest interest rate balances first, because they couldn't compete in the market if they didn't. I think this is a great example where regulation can enforce good behavior aka "fair dealing" while ensuring there's a level playing field so good actors aren't at a disadvantage competing with bad actors.
I think so-called bad actors will take variable pricing a "step too far". At some point it crosses an ethical line and becomes predatory. We haven't exactly seen where that line is drawn, but certainly user-agent sniffing is just the beginning. The airlines can afford millions in R&D to develop the algorithms to exploit maximum utility, but who is there who can monetize the algorithms which shield customers against these pricing attacks? When the most popular browser is made by an advertising company whose existence depends on collecting these metrics, it does make you wonder.
As for user-agent sniffing, I suspect it's less prevalent in the airline industry than most other areas of e-commerce, since nearly everyone comparison shops, most airlines' tickets are available from multiple vendors at prices fixed at a given time by a purchaser-agnostic GDS, and the meta-search sites sometimes accused of agent-sniffing not only don't control the prices but often have to rely on outdated caches to actually display them at all...
The "profitability" of any individual ticket is debatable. But, overall, the US airlines are now very profitable. There was a spate of mergers over the years, and now there is an oligopoly.
As Andrew Ross Sorkin recently put it:
Far from “hypercompetitive,” the airline
industry is increasingly looking like an
uncompetitive oligopoly.
I've heard (but have no sources or anything to back it up) that they ditch people without calling them out if they're not checked in and haven't checked in luggage.
That's the main reason I think it's shortsighted to massively publish loopholes like this. If just a few people are doing it, they'll ignore it. But when someone creates a highly visible service like this to encourage it, there's a good chance it will become too common for them to ignore. If the expected outcome of that would be that the loophole was closed in a way that makes pricing more fair for everyone, great. But I can't see how anyone who pays attention to how airlines operate could expect that to be the case.
In the short term, we win. In the long term, we lose.
The founder posted a reddit post about it awhile back, that he was getting sue for gaming the system.
The website basically find cheapers deal by combining tickets with lay over. Ticket A get you from LA to CA to NY. But you want to go to TX. You can just get a second ticket and skip NY and use second ticket to go CA to TX and it'll be cheaper.
Good for the dude for winning. I thought it was crazy that he got sued for this.
The suit was dismissed over a jurisdiction issue. In other words, the judge didn't say "United Airlines is terrible and can't ever sue this guy because what he did is 100% legal", the judge just said "if you're going to sue him, do it in a jurisdiction where he lives or operates his business". Which means, if they want to, United can simply file the suit in the correct geographic location and continue on.
Also, buying a hidden-city ticket is usually a bad idea since to use it you do have to violate the airline's terms, which can cost you any frequent-flier benefits you might ever have hoped to accrue, and you can't check any bags (since the bags may go on to the ticketed destination regardless of whether you hop off halfway there).
The bags will not go to the destination however. They should delay takeoff and pull them off the plane when you don't get on.
In practice, not so much. My favorite example: a couple years ago when I was regularly flying in and out of DCA (from Kansas City), sometimes I'd take the direct flight and sometimes I'd take a connection in Charlotte. But several times when I took the connection, I'd arrive in Kansas City to find my bags waiting in the airline baggage office, since they'd taken the direct flight and arrived a couple hours earlier.
I used to commute by air weekly in the pre-9/11 days and used hidden city bookings every week. Not only did it save my company money, the airlines didn't check to see if you actually boarded the second leg of the flight so you'd accumulate mileage for the leg(s) you skipped. The result was a lower-cost round trip flight with 1000 extra miles banked every week.