Okay and what if you paid the $1.25 for the two liter bottle and only drank twenty ounces of it. And a store employee followed you out and said “If you only drank twenty ounces of soda, you skiplagged that two liter bottle. You should have paid $2.25 for the twenty ounce bottle. You owe us a dollar.”
You’d be okay with that, right? After all, by buying the two liter bottle you entered into a contract with the store to drink two liters of soda and you should be penalized for not fulfilling the contract.
As long as we’re offering far-fetched analogies, how about this one:
You’re a young teenager, and you ask your mom, “If I take the dirty dishes to the kicthen, will you drive me to the library after dinner so I can do some schoolwork?”
She agrees. You’re riding toward the library, but as you reach the mall and are stopped at a red light, you jump out of the car and say “You can just let me out here, Mom!”
“Oh no,” she says. “I agreed to drive you to the library, not to the mall. If I had known you wanted me to drive you to the mall, I would have required more than just carrying your dirty dishes to the kitchen.”
But you’re already on your way into the mall. Why should she mind? You’re just not using the second half of the ride even though you paid for the whole thing.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it’s to encourage people to use the smaller airport rather than driving to a major airport maybe 2 hours away to grab a cheaper flight. In 1984 we wanted to visit friends in Venezuela. Dad asked the price of our tickets Madison to Miami to Merida vs. O’Hare to Miami to Merida (thinking we could just grab the ALCO bus to O’Hare and back). It was cheaper to go Madison to Miami to Merida.
Realistically odds are, if you have only carry on and only do it once, that they won’t catch you: they’ll assume you lost track of time at the bar or ate the wrong thing and are in the bathroom barfing, etc.
But if 70% of the Madison to Denver to Tucson flight consistently doesn’t make the plane in Denver, they’re gonna cancel that flight.
And as a last thought: sometimes life isn’t fair. Cracking down on skiplagging might just qualify.
Then follow the terms of the contract which specifically disallow skiplagging. That’s more business like than purchasing a ticket to a fictional destination you have no intention of going to, violating the terms of the contract you agreed to follow, all to save a few bucks on your trip.
I wonder how many passengers have read the contract of carriage? Or how frequently airlines enforce violations of which they are aware?
I, for one, welcome the day an airline employee actually places an oversized “carryon” in that little metal frame and insists that it be checked! (Presuming the CoC says anything about carryons!)
Yeah, it is a contract. But in practice, it is a list of technicalities the airlines can selectively enforce when they consider it to be to their advantage.
I am sure there’s a bunch of garbly-gook in there about passenger safety and other legal-ease that protects the airline from lawsuits, that are rarely encountered unless there is a very specific problem. But skiplagging doesn’t pose any safety or legal risk to the airline - it’s purely financial. They want to be able to continue charging more, artificially more, for something that really does not cost them more. They use this CoC as a tool to keep ripping-off their customers.
I welcome the day an airline does and a passenger’s “defense” is “But it only weighs sixty pounds and I weigh only 150 pounds. That’s less combined than many of the passengers by themselves. It’s even less by volume than many of the passengers. You’re telling me that I have to check this, even though others passengers are allowed to walk on with an equal or greater volume and weight than my bag and I combined? How does that make sense? I pay for space and weight, and you’re telling me part of my space and weight is going to have to go with the checked baggage, while that heavyset gentleman over there gets to being his entire girth into the main cabin like some kind of royalty???”
That’s not necessarily true, though. It is possible that certain routes are only possible if both of these are true: (1) the majority of passengers pay full fare for a single leg flight and (2) a minority of passengers pay discounted fare for a two-legged flight. That if the majority of passengers all paid the discounted fare, the flight would be unprofitable, that if no passengers paid the discounted fare, or if the discounted fare was eliminated and everyone paid the same per leg no one in their right mind would fly the two-leg route at all, and the entire route would become unprofitable.
ETA: Consider also a hypothetical in which a flight has both fixed and variable costs (not really a hypothetical), and that is possible, for example, that only the single leg fares could possibly recoup the fixed costs (that’s getting into the hypothetical territory) while, once they have done so, there is still some seating left at the optimal fixed cost price point, which allows additional seats to be filled by people paying discounted two-leg fares that recover their added variable costs (such as the cost of fuel) only.
And that’s not even considering the complex interactions between routes where it might actually make perfect sense to fly a plane with crew only and no passengers just to get to a destination, even at a loss for that individual flight, but it sure would be nice to recoup some of that loss if possible.
Welcome to the world of pricing things to the public. When my job title was “Pricer” the goal was to set the highest price your customers would be willing to pay for your service. The cost of providing service was part of the analysis, but if customers valued something highly you priced it high, and if they valued it low, you priced it low. If you had a strong market position, you priced high, if you had lots of competition, you priced low.
You wind up with some services that are very profitable and some that are less profitable, but that doesn’t mean less profitable is a place you’re willing to go for all of your services. Low profit services fill a niche, they supplement the income from your more profitable lines, the day they start cannibalizing those other services is the day you stop offering them.
Airlines have many customers who value the direct major airport flights highly enough to pay full price, they will not ever willingly turn those into discount flights. It’s the price sensitive customers from small airports who are going to have their prices change, upward.
If you’re saying that all comsumer prices should be directly proportional to the company’s costs, that’s naive and unrealistic (and not necessarily to anyone’s advantage).
You apparently aren’t aware that I have a customer contract that specifically allows me to skiplag. And the airline accepted this contract when they sold me a ticket.
It’s also wrong when the power imbalance between the two parties is so great that one party can take advantage of the other, and chooses to do so. That’s the case with airlines and their customers.
All that idealized capitalism only works in a world of perfect information and comparable power, axioms that are routinely broken in the real world. The airlines might have the legal right to screw over customers who chose to exit early, but they surely can’t claim the mortal Gogh ground in doing so.
