> skiplagging.... costs airlines tens of thousands in lost revenue
That's some unrealised-gain bullshit logic that would make a crypto-bro blush.
Airlines cost me millions, millions I say!, per day in lost revenue because they very unfairly do not wire me 10% of their income every day as I think they should.
>> skiplagging.... costs airlines tens of thousands in lost revenue
>That's some unrealised-gain bullshit logic that would make a crypto-bro blush.
I agree that the logic for equating potential lost sales as actual lost revenue is flawed, but in this case the numbers are very conservative, and thus entirely plausible. Apparently there are more than 4 billion flights per year pre pandemic[1], so "tens of thousands" (50k?) in actual losses (ie. cases where someone bought the cheaper ticket, and would have otherwise purchased the more expensive ticket) seems like an absolute certainty.
The people coming to the bakery this morning cost me 1k in actual losses (ie. cases where someone bought the bread directly from the bakery but would have otherwise purchased the bread from me at 3 times the price).
Actions like this are a mark of a company with excess staff. If someone is so bored that they took it upon themselves to require someone ride on a second leg of a trip, there’s probably some bloat in their org.
And how are they claiming they lost money due to skip lagging? If anything they’d gain money on the smaller amount of fuel needed for the second leg because he wasn’t on it.
The word kafkaesque becomes more relevant every day.
They count it as lost money basically by saying that since there was an empty seat on the second leg (despite the fact that it was already paid-for by ticket) - therefore counting that against potential profit.
It's bullshit accounting to spin things in their favor.
How was this legal? Missing a connecting flight means you’re detained and forced to buy a new ticket? Dispute that charge for not providing service as paid for.
One clarification - he wasn't detained in Charlotte, he was questioned in Florida before he got on the first leg of his flight. The gate agents then canceled his full itinerary and made him buy a full fair ticket to Charlotte.
The reason this happened is because adults intimidated a child. If it were me, I would have told them to fuck off, sure that I was planning to go to NYC, and oh crap I'd unexpectedly get food poisoning in Charlotte and had to stay there.
Airlines are trying to have their cake and eat it, too, with their BS fare games. If they don't want people "skiplagging" they should price their tickets accordingly.
Wait, this kid didn’t do anything illegal. They can’t detain him at airport security on behalf of the airline to resolve a civil matter and they definitely can’t legally force him to buy a direct ticket. He’s free to leave at any point in the trip and is certainty not obligated contractually to complete it. I’m pretty sure he can and should sue for being wrongfully detained and intimidated into paying twice for the same trip in order to set a precedent. Maybe we should even start a gofundme to help him do that
I’m sure airlines will “solve” this “problem” by adding them to their no fly lists (or perhaps a flagged-but-not-yet-banned list). Unreliable and unruly passengers can and will be denied ticket sales. Airlines can and will share these lists amongst themselves for “safety” reasons and “to ensure the best service”.
Doesn’t the airline actually save nominally on the connecting flight by not having to haul the kid’s weight and baggage? I get they don’t get the shakedown fare they want to charge but isn’t that really because they have inconsistent and unfair policies when it comes to setting fares?
In no way defending the airline’s actions here, but in theory they are trying to price discriminate. From their perspective, would have probably preferred two nonstop fares at a higher price
It's slightly more than the missed revenue from the failed shakedown. An empty seat is a seat that could have been sold to someone who paid full price. If you hadn't checked in for the flight you weren't intending to take, they could have made a bit more money.
And yet they were so eager to pay the passenger (in the form of a discount) to block that seat on the second leg from being used by a hypothetical other paying customer, even though the passenger being paid to sit in the seat didn't actually want to.
Direct flights from A->B command a premium price. The reason the airline comes out money behind is that the person did not choose the pay that premium for the direct (or less stops) flight.
Generally the premium is higher than the increased cost of one more passenger on that last leg.
Why indirect flight is cheaper than direct one to the intermediate destination. This should be illegal. It's a sign of some nefarious price fixing. No explanation from the airlines should be accepted for something like that.
It’s not price fixing. It’s price discrimination. It’s not nice, but it’s a fundamental economic/pricing tenant (doesn’t excuse the airlines treatment of this boy).
I used this trick when I was his age! Never had any issues. Saved a bunch of money.
Only way to get caught is to offer the details up. He had to have told the agents the wrong city or something like that.
Anyway it’s a great trick to shave a few bucks off your flight. And let’s be honest, they would do it to you if the situation was reversed. They 100% would.
On more than one flight in my life they have been over booked and need people to come to the counter and take whatever they are offering. One time out of key west Florida the airlines refused to start boarding until a few passengers took another flight.
Back in the day (I haven't checked lately) if you bought a round trip ticket from, say, LA-NY-LA, the price was significantly lower if you stayed in NY over the weekend because the airlines assumed that if you didn't stay for the weekend you were a business traveler who was writing off the expense while if you stayed over the weekend you were a cost-conscious tourist.
Clever people who needed to make two closely spaced round trips would book one ticket LA-NY-LA and a second ticket NY-LA-NY. They would fly out to NY on Monday on ticket #1, return home to LA on Friday using ticket #2, go back to NY the following Monday using ticket #2 and return to LA the following Friday using the second half of ticket #1. Both tickets stayed at their mid point over a weekend, so they paid the lower fare.
This was easy to do before airline security increased due to 9/11 because there were no TSA checkpoints (anyone remember when you could meet arriving passengers at the gate? and airlines didn't really check ID when boarding, so you could book the two tickets with a slight misspelling of your name and the agents at the gate would let you board.
The family looks well off (and clearly flies a lot), so this is a tough one as to which way it'll go; probably AA will back down after a while, and then lobby/bribe congress to make it illegal.
air travel pricing is weird AF. save from the direct vs connecting flight (as in this case), long haul, intercontinental flights are quite often to and return ticket priced quite similarly (it usually makes more sense to buy return then one way...)
God, I despise how much bullshit corporations will try to convince the populace that something is somehow morally wrong when all it does is make them less money:
1. Even the name "skiplagging" sounds similar to the invented crime of "jaywalking" to me - jaywalking a crime famously invented by US car companies to take control of our roads.
2. "At the gate, however, Logan's North Carolina ID raised red flags with the agent and the teen was subsequently taken to a security room and interrogated, Hunter said." I would be livid if I were this kid's parents. They're trying to treat their BS way to make more money as a crime.
In short, airlines are fucking around and I hope they find out.
While interesting, this is just the word's origin; the comment you're responding to is claiming that the auto industry made jaywalking a crime. That claim seems to be based in fact:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797
>1. Even the name "skiplagging" sounds similar to the invented crime of "jaywalking" to me - jaywalking a crime famously invented by US car companies to take control of our roads.
I think you're really reaching here. While "jaywalking" can be construed as having a negative connotation ("jay" means "a dull or ignorant person"), the same can't be said for "skiplagging" which so far as I can tell doesn't contain any negative connotations. (ie. "skip" from skipping a particular leg, and "lagged" in reference to "leg" or "jetlag". Moreover, there's literally a site called skiplagged.com that helps people find tickets. If they're trying to demonize the term, they're doing a really bad job.
Ah yes, it predates that law. It looks like there's a phasse-in period, during which certain rules apply, and then in 2029 new, slightly different rules apply. At a quick glance. I can't quite tell what the differences are, or why they need the 2029 changeover.
A ticket desk noticed his Driver's License and deduced. Probably an existing policy to look out for this kind of shortcut and a brownie point awarded. Not sure why a reasonable person would turn this kid in or how it would otherwise be discovered.
Ticket desk? What decade are we talking about? The only ticket desk is if you check bags everyone else has a printed boarding pass you go straight to tsa. The folks at the airplane gate don’t look at id and are rushing everyone in.
Doesn't say that in the article, and he had a state-issued ID. Now, perhaps he had one just for this, but I could believe the kid is 15 years old, which means he isn't an "unaccompanied minor" in airline terms. And if it was a driver's license (as reported in other outlets, but I'm pretty sure that they didn't fact-check that detail), he'd have to be 16 to have one.
Do you have another source for this? I'd love to be wrong.
You are simply incorrect. Modern airports are full of kiosks that require you to show an ID before they will give out any information (call it what you will, I call it a ticket desk, since they can usually print you boarding passes). Since you didn't read the article carefully and clearly don't know how airports work in this age, it's really up to you to be outraged at phantoms.
“We've used Skiplagged almost exclusively for the last five to eight years” Seems trivial to flag people who frequently use this trick. Or just flag based upon resident address.
Come on, this is low-grade fraud, and even if airlines did not "lose money" it would still have the potential for headaches and confusion in a cascade effect.
When I book an airline ticket, I'm making a contract that says "I'm paying you to transport my person and belongings from Point A to Point B to Point C with these details." Now unless I cancel or modify that reservation, the airline is expecting me to follow through, because I'm monetarily invested.
What are the consequences of missing my flight? My name will be on the manifest and the airline will wonder what happened to me. They probably won't file a missing persons report, but their records will note that I had a flight but I wasn't on it.
So what if I've done some "hidden city ticketing" and the aircraft on the last leg crashes? My friends and family, and first responders, might wonder where I am at that point. Was I on the flight? Did I miss it? Why would I miss the last leg of a multipoint flight?
What if I am "hidden city ticketing" to another country? Isn't that going to get sticky with immigration? I mean, I fly to Spain and then Istanbul, and my airline continues on to Kazakhstan, but I'm hanging out at the Hagia Sophia. What are the Kazakhstani authorities gonna say about my visa plans or however I faked out everybody and made them believe I was going there? Isn't Turkey going to have something to say about my continued presence when I never should've left the airport?
Logistically, it must really mess up the airlines' planning and operations. If people get in the habit of reserving seats they don't intend to fart in, then that's a capacity problem. Passengers gonna get bumped. Imagine a whole 737 full of "hidden city ticketer" seats that doesn't even bother departing.
Yeah, I get it, passengers save money. Solve the fare imbalance somehow, airlines! Obviously if hackers are hacking you then you need a mitigation, and it's bad optics for you to detain and interrogate a script kiddie, such that he makes a headline on the Daily Fail. COVID-19 hurt us all; suck it up.
It's not fraud. I get what you're saying with the operational concern trying to locate an unaccompanied minor who was supposed to be at the gate and is now 'missing'. But he paid the price the airline posted for the ticket. Who got defrauded?
The passenger asserts at booking that "I will be at the boarding gate before the plane leaves because I intend to occupy seat X on your aircraft" but that's a lie, because they have no such intention to board the aircraft. That's the fraud, and that's why it's low-grade, because people miss flights accidentally for numerous reasons, this is just a deliberate missing of a flight, and taking away resources from someone else who should have them. Although overbooking, bumping, and standby are all policies in place to deal with the inevitable missed flights, whatever their reason.
Booking a flight and then not getting on it isn’t fraud. By this logic buying a sandwich and then not eating it should be fraud because you implied that you intended to eat it then didn’t
If I buy the last sandwich, then I've deprived someone else of that sandwich by purchasing it. In case you haven't noticed, seats on an aircraft are a limited resource. You make a "reservation" to declare that you intend to occupy that seat, and the corollary is that nobody else will be able to occupy it. If enough fraudsters reserve seats without using them, the airline has another problem. Say they loaded the galley with 100 peanut packets because 100 passengers promised to board, but now there's only 20 on the flight, what are we gonna do with all these peanuts?
As I mentioned, airlines have plenty of policies to deal with reserved but unused seats, but you've still intentionally taken away a finite resource because you wanted to save a couple bucks.
The airline asserts at booking that they will "grant me exclusive access to seat X on a specific flight from A to B" but that's a lie, because they have no intention to honour the contract if they are overbooked (or if they don't sell enough tickets and the flight is cancelled).
When the consumer does something to save money you call it "fraud". When the airline does it, it's okay because "policies"? Putting aside the asinine "contract" for a second, how is one morally correct, while the other isn't?
> The airline asserts at booking that they will "grant me exclusive access to seat X on a specific flight from A to B" but that's a lie, because they have no intention to honour the contract if they are overbooked (or if they don't sell enough tickets and the flight is cancelled).
This is a moot point because they never promised exclusive access in the first place.
>Putting aside the asinine "contract" for a second, how is one morally correct, while the other isn't?
This just moves the goalposts to an area where anything goes. You could argue that skiplagging is morally correct, because your morals are "corporations are scum, consumers are always in the right", or take a hardcore deontological view that any sort of lying/misrepresentation is morally wrong.
>This is a moot point because they never promised exclusive access in the first place.
That's the implied deal when they sell you the ticket. It's the public perception. Only in the fine print does it says otherwise. Hence, that's why people are so outraged when it happens to them.
I'd also argue that the corporation's contract with the consumer is not fair because there is a gross imbalance of power. Airlines (as a group) can put almost anything they want and the consumer has no recourse (except meek consumer protection laws).
Anyways, I just found it interesting that you jumped at the opportunity to vociferously call what the consumer did "fraud" but what the airlines do (ie double booking) as normal business.
While it's correct in a legal sense, I don't think that's a very interesting discussion. The contract is the contract, sure. But the big picture deserves examination also.
>This just moves the goalposts to an area where anything goes.
No, we were discussing a very specific situation. Don't do that.
So many people have unused gym memberships that the gym can afford to purchase 3 new treadmills every year. Seems like a fair tradeoff.
But you've strawmanned this. Do you go to the gym, put your towel down on the leg press machine, and then go to the juice bar for a drink? Because that's what we're discussing here: taking away a finite resource so that others can't use it.
People with unused gym memberships who don't show up haven't promised anything. They didn't make an appointment with a personal trainer, they don't have machines reserved, there's no implicit contract to exchange limited resources for a membership fee. Your membership fee gives you access to these resources, not a guarantee of their usage. If you go to the gym and every treadmill is in use, then you don't get a treadmill for now. You just wait for a treadmill.
evidently the airline priced that resource at a negative value. (Florida to Charlotte $X, Florida to Charlotte to NY $X-$Y.) so apparently that resource was worse than useless.
It's only negative if you think airline's pricing model is something simple like "distance traveled * cost per mile", which isn't the model that airlines with advanced revenue management systems use.
Honestly, I didn’t read their comment as taking any sides; it’s really just descriptive of their perspective. There are good arguments for why this is fraud in a particular way and another commenter in this thread pointed out (correctly, in my opinion) that “overbooking” is a similar kind of fraud on the airlines’ part.
Point being, many happenings are more nuanced than Alice wronged Bob and Bob did nothing wrong to Alice. I suspect if you read the parent comment again you may indeed find some of their points to be agreeable.
This is a pretty agreeable take except the seeming implication that any “skiplaggers” are doing something wrong. They really just (currently) play the airlines’ game better and the airlines are being over-sensitive about it.
The proper solution for this would be for the airlines to fix their pricing issues rather than to intimidate random passengers into paying the “correct” amount and pretend it was the individual passenger’s fault when they committed this supposed fraud.
