

Judge throws out United Airlines lawsuit against Skiplagged.com founder - staunch
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/01/investing/united-airlines-lawsuit-skiplagged/?iid=TL_Popular

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zaroth
Shame on the airlines for such a gaping hole in their pricing model, but
hacking the system like this isn't without its negative externalities...

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.

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notahacker
If airlines can't play pricing games there will be fewer flights and higher
average prices. Airlines make an average of $7 per passenger, so those last
minute $100 hikes to ticket prices or higher ticket prices for in-demand
direct flights generally aren't buying private jets for airline executives,
they're making the route actually viable to operate.

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?

~~~
zaroth
The ability to freely set prices is no doubt a cornerstone of capitalism and
there would certainly be significant inefficiencies introduced by any "fair
pricing" regulations.

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.

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notahacker
Sure, creative pricing strategies aren't always in the interest of the
consumer, but purely hypothetical suggestions of possibilities to personalise
prices to a maximal extent is not a justification for eviscerating marginal
airline routes by forcing the airlines to price weekly.

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...

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zippergz
The biggest problem I have with skiplagged is that I know the airlines WILL
find a way to prevent this if people are doing it en masse. Make no mistake.
And it's virtually guaranteed that whatever they do to stop it will not
benefit passengers. In the best case, it will only hurt the people using these
tricks, but I'd be willing to bet there will be some collateral damage.

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.

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digitalzombie
YES! This is awesome.

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.

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ubernostrum
He didn't "win" anything.

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).

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maaku
Or have a return ticket on the same reservation.

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.

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ubernostrum
In theory, your bags aren't supposed to take a flight you didn't take unless
they're catching up to you after being delayed/lost.

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.

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tzz
What API service does this person use to find these cheap tickets? Or are
there any good API service providers to find ticket price?

