I think they could change the itinerary, as long as they get you to San Francisco.
I think this is a “be careful what you wish for” situation. The end result would likely be airlines pricing each leg of a trip separately, to eliminate the option of skiplagging. Almost certainly that would lead to higher prices for most trips.
Sorry. If I had seen that thread, I likely would not have posted this thread. Funny that another, older thread came up, but not this one…
To me, it seems purely like a pricing issue OBO the airlines. I highly doubt they are losing money on the 2-leg flight. Their security and wasted fuel arguments impress me purely as rationalization of their true concern which is that they wish they could’ve charged more.
I was surprised at the suggestion that some airlines might sue passengers over this. My assumption was that generally you cannot sue someone for something they didn’t do (yes, plenty of exceptions to that general statement. So we don’t need to go off on that tangent.) I’m not sure what their damages would be.
They are not obligated to get you to San Francisco through Denver, but since the flight will probably have 80% of the passengers or more getting off at Denver, they are not going to direct the flight somewhere else.
I go from Indianapolis to Oakland through Denver all the time, and the Denver to Oakland leg got cancelled on a regular basis. They always rebooked me going through someplace else.
BTW, some of you might remember when round trip flights were much less than twice as expensive as one-way ones. Sometimes less than the one way fare. If you wanted a one way, it was common to book a round trip and not use the return leg. The airlines got mad at this also. I think they have rationalized this practice, at least.
If the feds decide to eliminate the right for airlines to price such that skiplagging works, this will be the outcome.
Or just if skiplagging becomes so prevalent that the airlines need to price to take it into account.
Pricing in a way that makes skiplagging possible seems fairly reasonable. The economic value of a flight from Montreal to Milwaukee has much less than the economic value of a flight from Montreal to Chicago so all else being equal you’d expect the former to have a lower price than the latter.
As a practical matter the optimal way to provide service from Montreal to Milwaukee is via a stop in Chicago, but that doesn’t affect the economic value of either route. So the natural route to Milwaukee “contains” a trip to Chicago that is of higher value than the overall trip.
The only ways to make that situation skiplagging-proof are:
- Only offer direct flights from Montreal to Milwaukee. These fights are likely to be rare and inconvenient (like weekly, at best) because demand is so low.
- Price the trip to Milwaukee higher the trip to Chicago. Few people would take this trip, because it the trip is now priced well above its value.
- Price both trips according to their economic value, and prohibit skiplagging.
If option 3 is not allowed, then one of the other options must happen. To me they both seem like worse practical outcomes.
'Zactly.
Here’s a (definitely stretched) metaphor.
- Some restaurants are “all you can eat buffets”.
- Due to customer complaints about fine print on the offer saying “no takeouts from the buffet”, some vote-seeking politician bans buffets from having or enforcing a “no takeouts” provision.
- Headline hoped for result: unlimited free leftovers for all.
- Actual real-world result: No “all you can eat” buffets; everything is now charged by the each or the ounce.
This strikes me as a huge rationalization. Yes, if a passenger skips a flight they were expected to be on, the plane will use marginally less fuel than expected. But it’s not like that fuel is wasted. It stays in the plane’s fuel tanks, and it’ll get burned and turned into thrust eventually.
You’re right that it’s 99%+ BS.
But fuel burn depends on weight. There are circumstances where we tanker extra fuel from here to there because it’s cheaper here than there. But if we load, say, 2000# of extra fuel, we’ll burn an extra ~70lbs/hour carrying that extra weight. Which offsets some of the savings.
Said another way, each extra passenger burns an extra gallon per hour. Each passenger planned for but left off saves a gallon of fuel by their absence but costs a teaspoon of extra burn from that gallon we loaded unnecessarily to carry them.
At the same time, so many flights are full with so many standbys hoping to get on that any passenger no-showing is simply replaced by another body. Making the fuel argument completely moot. At least most of the time.
This idea has been known for years, if not decades, as the “hidden city trick”. Who on earth came up with that ridiculous name “skiplagging”?
Nobody could think of a -gate term.
Probably the same person who came up with “gate lice”.
How would they not know? This is all automated.
Automated yes, but I assume the gate agent is going to have to look up your reservation to find out whether you checked anything. They’re not going to know which of a couple hundred passengers checked bags.
If the passenger hadn’t been on the flight. Would they be sure enough that the passenger was really not going to run back from the toilet at the last second to resell the seat? The argument that they could sell the seat to a standby if the skiplagging passenger hadn’t taken it not intending to use it seems slightly better than the fuel argument.
Gate agents aren’t real relevant to this process / scam.
You buy a ticket from spoke A to hub B to spoke C. Get on the first plane at spoke A and ride to hub B. Get off the plane. Instead of hiking to some other gate and boarding the plane to spoke C you instead hike to the curb & grab an uber to wherever.
Which gate agent are you interacting with who could see anything unusual?
All of this is a natural consequence of non-stops being more valuable and hence higher-priced than one-stop trips.
It’s not a matter of selling. Remember that tickets are for travel from A to B on any flight, not just a particular flight. It’s not like a ticket to a sporting event or concert where if you miss the date, the ticket is now valueless.
They’ve already sold more tickets than they have seats. More people than they have seats for are sitting there at the airport. A few minutes before departure time they cancel the seat reservation (not the ticket) of the skiplagger and give the seat to some other ticket holder who until that moment didn’t have a seat. If the skiplagger suddenly appears from the bar or toilet or whatever and wants to board the answer is “Tough shit; you snoozed and losed. You’re next in line on the standby list for the next flight to your destination.”
When you fail to board the second leg of the flight, the gate agent (or another airline employee) will want to check if you’ve got any checked bags on board, because, hypothetically, you might have left a bomb in them.
That’s a pretty big assumption, particularly where a cheaper fare is being offered for the stop. Presumably, if they could fill up A to B or B to C planes without having to offer cheaper A to C via B tickets, they would do so. It also suggests that there is something lost to the airline when it allows someone to buy an A to C via B seat: namely, the opportunity to sell an A to B seat at a higher price. This is true whether or not they can actually fill the B to C seat with a standby. And depending on the destinations, the B to C standby might not make up for the difference in revenue, even if there is such a hypothetical gap-plugger.
At our level of detail what matters is that sometimes checked bags can travel without passengers and sometimes they cannot.
In any case a computer is monitoring who’s had their boarding pass scanned to get on a flight and also which baggage has been loaded aboard that flight. If there’s something amiss, the computer will notice and tell the humans to resolve the discrepancy. Which usually means a gate agent comes aboard to be sure passenger X really isn’t on board, while some ramp dudes dig passenger X’s bag(s) out of the belly. All those barcodes and scanners at every step of the process exist for a reason.
The smart skiplagger doesn’t check a bag. Not due to security concerns but because they really don’t want their underwear in some other city where they aren’t.