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American Airlines Sues Skiplagged Over "Hidden City" Tickets
American Airlines has sued travel website Skiplagged for offering "hidden city" fares that take advantage of a ticket pricing loophole. (www.gatechecked.com) More...
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Unfortunately skip-lagging doesn't work if you have to check bags. But what does work is this: Say you have to plan a round trip (with bags) leaving on a Monday and coming back on Friday, from City A to City B. Instead, book two roundtrip tickets: Leave A on Monday, coming back anytime two weeks later, and another rountrip leaving B on Friday and coming back any time two weeks later. Then simply take the outbound flight each time and throw away the return half of both. Since both roundtrips involve a stay over a Saturday night, each roundtrip will be much cheaper, and both together often still much cheaper than the single roundtrip A-B-A leaving Monday and returning Friday. I've saved thousands over the years doing this.
Many of my customers have used this trick. Airlines here never complained, b/c they got full fare.
How may 2 RT tickets sum up cheaper than 1 RT with this technique? You mentioned about Saturday stay over. I live outside of US. I remember in old days THY had promotion fares for RT requiring at least 1 night stay, and if I remember correctly also required Saturday night stay which suited me best for the weekend trips. Your comment recalled me that one. But that was promotional fare only for select routes for a month only. Your seems to be applied generally for AA, or to all airlines in US.
Amazing. Suing because they are using their smarts. I've long shunned American Airlines and this just gives me another reason to continue. So long as a person has paid the fare it's up to them if or how much of that fare they choose to use.
It's not just AA, UA does it too.
Also, other international carriers use it. I've found such tickets on my own many years before was amazed and surprised. It was years before that website was created. I detected them because had a transfer flight, otherwise wouldn't have been able to find them. As @srobak mentioned below - it's they who created the situation. But imagine because of that application now most people are aware of this and would use this technique. Thus airlines try their best to keep people away from using this trick. They might be not successful in court, however, they ban passengers when they find out a passenger cut their transfer flight mid-way. So if you think to use it, be careful.
