Ought skiplagging be permitted?

Great Debates
1

Read an article in the paper yesterday about skiplagging, the practice of using only the first leg of a multi-leg flight. Apparently for some routes, you can buy a cheaper ticket from Chicago to San Fran with a stop in Denver, than a direct flight from Chicago to Denver. So people who want to go to Denver buy the ticket to SF, and simply get off in Denver, causing the seat on the Denver to SF leg to go unused. The linked article explains it pretty well.

The airlines strongly oppose this practice, and may penalize people they catch doing it by cancelling their frequent flier miles, future flights, or even legal action. It is not illegal, but it violates the airlines contract of carriage. Apparently the prohibit use of only the 2d (or 3d) leg if you did not take the 1st.

The practice never occurred to me, but I have a hard time thinking of skiplaggers as doing anything wrong. They paid for 2 flights, but only wanted to use one of them. If there is any loss, then it results from the airline’s pricing decision.

If I pay for a multi-course meal, but decide I’m full before dessert comes, the restaurant does not hold me down and force dessert down my throat.

2

I don’t really think either side is doing anything especially wrong. The airline’s pricing strategy isn’t unreasonable but it creates some weird loopholes, and the passengers are going out of their way to use these loopholes in full knowledge that they might be rapped on the knuckles at some point. Nobody is being forced into this situation.

3

And while the airlines publicly state that they oppose it, and may impose penalties for it, I doubt they actually have a strong objection, or exert any non-negligible effort at catching it. The practice as a whole works for their benefit, too, as a form of price discrimination.

4

The airlines should get over themselves. So the little guy figured out how to save a few bucks by not using part of what they paid for, and now the airline has an empty seat on the 2nd leg of someone’s itinerary. BFD. I am not seeing how this harms the airline, unless you consider that empty seat on the 2nd leg a lost opportunity to sell it to another passenger (even tho it was already paid for). I have little sympathy for the airlines on this one.

5

Agree with @snowthx.

The only thing the airlines are losing is the opportunity to double-charge for a seat.

mmm

6

We just had a fairly long thread about the factual nature of it, but it did go into the merits/morals as well.

7

The airlines didn’t sell them two flights, they sold them one flight with a stop.

There are many valid reasons why the cost of that flight might be cheaper than the others. There’s nothing stopping you from taking advantage of that. Once. But there’s equally nothing stopping the airline from refusing to carry you again.

8

It’s easy to fill major flights from one big airport to another. It’s harder to fill short regional flights. Airlines use pricing to control how full flights are, so it makes sense to their models to offer a discount for a one-stop flight that gets people into the seats of a shorter flight.

The airline isn’t actually harmed if you take the discounted ticket and skip the second flight. They whine because it ends up being an empty seat they might have been able to sell to someone else for more than you paid, but you did in fact pay for that seat. This kind of “opportunity loss” isn’t a real loss, but the airlines only see the empty seat.

If airlines really wanted to stop skiplagging, they could adjust their models so that the math never worked out, where a stop with a connection or layover was never cheaper than a direct flight. This would probably result in more empty seats on smaller flights and more overbooking on direct flights. Nobody would win. So they continue the practice, and punish travelers for finding ways to game their system, because if everyone started skiplagging the result would be even worse than if they adjusted their model to discourage it.

9

One article I read on the practice (gift link) said that a couple of reasons why airlines don’t like it is that they waste time looking for the no-show passengers and that they calculate the amount of fuel based on the number of booked passengers, so some fuel ends up wasted (or not used).

10

Isn’t there a security issue/nuisance/cost associated with the security issue? That is, I don’t think your bags are allowed on the plane without you. So, you get on the plane, check your bag. The bag either stays on the plane (if it’s a stop with no transfer) or gets automatically moved to the other flight, and then they have to pull it off at the last minute if you don’t check in for the second one.

I could see charging a fee if you skip-lag with checked bags.

11

Almost no one who engages in the practice checks bags.

12

I imagine it’s risky, since the airline might fail to get your bag off the plane. However, if you do check a bag, shouldn’t they be allowed to charge some kind of nuisance/security fee?

13

To put it plainly, only an idiot would do this with a checked bag.

14

Isn’t there a security concern with a person not being a seat they are supposed to be in?

I was once on a flight where someone did not board after checking in, and we had to wait for them to take all the luggage off the plane and remove what that passenger had checked.

I realize that if you purposefully skip the last leg, you probably did not check anything, and are traveling with carry-on only, but they don’t know that.

When there is an empty seat on a plane, they probably have to go through all their records to see whether the person who is missing checked any luggage, and may even have to remove the bags from cargo to make sure there is nothing unaccounted for.

If the same plane is being used for the last leg, just being refueled, and getting a new crew, they probably have to search the empty seat and the bathrooms for things that shouldn’t be there, and do it surreptitiously, so as not to panic other passengers, and have other people want to leave the plane.

Granted, the airline, not the passenger, creates the problem with screwy pricing, and the solution should be to catch pricing errors and fix them, not punish passengers for taking advantage of them.

I’m assuming the errors are created by computers that create prices with algorithms based on popularity of final destinations, and preference for direct flights. When people put together indirect flights, they end up with cheaper flights, because they are freeing up a seat on a direct flight, and filling seats on sometimes hard to sell flights. But the computers don’t know to cross-check when a discount is getting so deep, it undersells a single leg of the flight as a direct flight. It can’t be that hard to add this ability.

15

They definitely know if you checked a bag or not. “All their records” are easily accessible electronically.

16

Yes, but a human has to stop and look at the collated results at a time when there may be a crew changeover.

I can see how this is a hassle for the airline-- but I also said it’s of their own making.

17

To answer the question, I think it should be permitted if you make it clear that is your intention.

18

Well, yeah.

And if you get told “No,” make a stink. Have a lawyer ready.

19

Noted in the OP’s linked article:

20

I have a question:

Suppose you buy a ticket on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco with a stop in Denver. Is the airline contracturally obligated to stop in Denver, or could they “replace” your flight with a direct one, or with one that has a stop in a different city?