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Lufthansa sues passenger who skipped his flight
A method commonly used by airline passengers to get cheaper fares is at the center of a court row between a German airline and one of its customers.
Lufthansa has taken a passenger, who didn't show up for the last leg of his ticketed journey, to court in an apparent bid to clamp down on "hidden city" ticketing. 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.
The unnamed passenger skipped a flight from Frankfurt to Oslo and flew using a separate Lufthansa reservation from Frankfurt to Berlin instead. Lufthansa is calling this a violation of their terms and conditions and has sued the passenger for €2,112 ($2,386).
This method does not work if you have checked bags, and other people have reported retaliation from airlines for the practice.
Also at Fortune and Popular Mechanics.
See also: Airlines hate 'hidden city ticketing,' but it's still one of the best ways to save a ton on your flights — if you know how to do it
Travel Site CEO's Reddit AMA Backfires When Redditors Turn on Him
(Score: 5, Informative) by rigrig on Thursday February 14 2019, @01:26AM (8 children)
Why they offer this weird pricing" (took me a while to find this in the reddit thread)
Airline A offers a direct flight from City 1->City 3 for $100
Airline B doesn't have a direct route, they only fly from City 1->City 2 and from City 2->City 3, both for $100
B still has some free seats on both trips, but nobody flies from City 1->City 3 with them, because it would cost $200 and involve another landing in City 2.
So B can only compete on City 1->City 3 by asking less than $100 for the combined trip.
(And I imagine if this becomes common practice they might start pricing it at $200 and offer a $125 rebate on arrival or something like that)
In this case it looks like they mostly lost because lack of transparency in their terms and conditions:
Passengers have no realistic way of knowing in advance how much the airline will charge for failure to show up.
In this case: the passenger booked a return ticket Oslo-(Frankfurt)-Seattle-(Frankfurt)-Oslo and a separate Frankfurt-Berlin ticket, and the airline wanted to charge him with the full difference for a Oslo-Frankfurt-Seattle-Frankfurt-Berlin ticket.
It looks like the judge also didn't think that was a fair calculation, as he only missed the last leg of the return journey.
(Note that this was a case in Germany, where consumers generally enjoy quite a bit of protection.)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14 2019, @02:11AM
Failure to show up?!? When did airlines start charging for not taking the flight you booked with them? Seriously, when did they start doing that? In all my years of flying I have never heard of this.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:22AM
You're imagining that net fares will decrease from $100 to $75 - sounds more like dreaming to me.
For decades, the fare from MIA to Washington DC ran around $900, while the fare from Fort Lauderdale to DC could be had for the mid hundreds at times, and always less than $300. Fort Lauderdale airport is something like a 30 minute drive from MIA, you could reserve a limo, with hookers (attractive ones - it's only a 30 minute ride after all), both ways MIA-FLL and FLL-MIA, and not only come out cheaper on the Fort Lauderdale route, but possibly with better timing for your schedule. Still, somehow, they fill those $900 seats.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 14 2019, @03:27AM (2 children)
I think this mostly ended up in court because of that final leg from Frankfurt-Berlin, proving pre-meditation and negating a simple "something came up and I had to miss my flight" defense.
Back in the 1990 time frame, I needed to buy a one-way fare from Europe back to the US, and, apparently, Belgium and the Netherlands had some kind of fare-structuring regulation at that time that required one-way fares to be priced approximately half of the round-trip fares. Flights from other countries were actually cheaper round-trip than they were one-way. There were many reasons, but I ended up driving and taking a train from Hamburg to Brussels, and spending a few nights on the way, to get my return flight - and it was net-cheaper to do it that way than to pay the one-way fare out of Hamburg.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:18PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 14 2019, @09:06PM
Hell yeah, even if the fares were the same there were people to see in Brussels anyway...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Touché) by darkfeline on Thursday February 14 2019, @04:24AM (1 child)
Maybe they should just lower their prices instead to fill those free seats? Supply and demand curves and whatnot.
All this is is a bug in their customer rape maximization algorithms, and they're getting angry people are taking advantage of it instead of fixing their goddamn algorithms.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 14 2019, @05:18PM
boom! +1
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:31PM
So basically airline B figured out to get paid for seats that are guaranteed to be empty otherwise yet letting people use it doesn't have extra cost for airline basically resulting in free money. If airline is allowed to be a smartass then why passengers can't be?