Skiplagging has been in the news lately. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s when you book a multi-leg flight, and then skip the last leg because the layover is actually where you want to end up. People do it because it’s actually cheaper than booking a flight from your origin to the the aforementioned layover.
I recently looked at flights to Japan. For Delta One, a round trip starting from Detroit is about $8500, whereas if I book trip from Lansing, it’s about $5000. Both trips use the same flight from Detroit to Japan. $3500 is a damn big price differential, and I can certainly see the incentive for skiplagging.
The big question then is why does this work? Why would an airline price a trip featuring a multi-leg itinerary cheaper than a trip where the nonstop flight is actually one of the legs of that cheaper trip?
One problem with this idea is that it only works if you don’t have checked bags, as they’re going to the final destination without you. Also, if you skip a leg on the outbound flight, the airline may cancel the rest of the itinerary.
There certainly can be some logistical challenges to making skiplagging work for you. But that’s beside the point: I’m wondering why an airline would price flights this way in the first place.
I think the idea is, if every other airline offers plenty of LA to NY flights, the airline that you own has to price its LA to NY flight competitively, and it’s a matter of trivia that you’re one of the only ones to do it with a stop in some podunk town in South Dakota in between. But if you’re one of the only ones flying to that podunk town, you can price a ticket to there much higher — unless the would-be ticket buyer to South Dakota pretends that, oh, no, I’m looking for a flight to NY, and I don’t give a crap about South Dakota, and I’ll shop around.
I thought the current law was the airplane cannot travel with unaccompanied baggage. So, if you check your baggage all the way through, but you do not hop on the connecting flight, there may be a delay for that flight while they retrive your luggage.
The airline may be engaging in a price war, or encouraging travel to a particular destination. Friend of mine regularly travelled from Toronto to Winnipeg and back, and at one point the airline (Air Canada?) offered a cheaper flight from Toronto to Saskatoon than to Wiinipeg. The flight stopped in Winnipeg to drop off some passengers (the ones who paid more) and pick up Winnipeg-to-Saskatoon customers.
This was in the days when tickets were either those paper red carbon tickets or new electronic tickets.The airline solved this problem by the simple expedient of going to electronic tickets and if you missed any part of the flight, all future legs are cancelled. (This is still the case today for all airlines, I believe) This was in the days when round trip was substantially cheaper than a pair of one-way.
(He also found back in the day, staying over a weekend was a cheaper trip, to soak the business travellers. He would book a round trip one way leaving on a Monday returning a week later on the Friday; then one for the intervening weekend, departing home on Friday returning on Monday. A travel agent warned him if the airline caught on they could cancel both tickets.)
As I mentioned, if you miss a leg, the rest of the eticket is cancelled - as I unerstand, normal airline policy today. But nowadays, you could buy individual separate one-way’s so they won’t cancel your return ticket. Just make sure they are separate ticket codes.
(I saw this mentioned as a problem for someone who missed the first short leg of an extended overseas trip, managed to snag a flight on different airline to arrive before their next leg’s flight left, only to be told their entire ticket thereafter had been cancelled.)
One reason is that a flight from A to C via B might take longer (and therefore something you would be unwilling to pay more for) than a flight from A to B, B to C, or A to C individually. The discount may be for willing to sit through two flights (with a layover of who knows how long) rather than, for example, take a single shorter flight on a competing airline that flies direct. You might at first glance think A to C via B should cost more than A to B because you’re going a longer distance, but your point of comparison really should be A to C. Would a direct flight from A to C be faster than one with a layover in B? Obviously it would. Hence the flight with the layover is going to have to be cheaper than the one without, otherwise who would buy a ticket with a layover like that?
Consider also that certain costs will be fixed (wear and maintenance for a given number of flying hours, crew salary, etc) while others are variable (fuel associated with per-passenger weight) and that if a leg consisting of direct flights (A to B, B to C) is rarely 100% full, it makes sense to try and recoup whatever else you can by offering discounted A to C via B tickets, perhaps based on the variable costs only provided the fixed costs will be recouped by the direct A to B or B to C passengers.
As I understand it, this “skiplagging” thing (I’ve also seen it described as hidden city ticketing) is something a number of airlines have addressed through policy changes (where they subject you to a penalty if you don’t complete all legs of your flight) and even (in the case of a website that facilitated such ticket purchases) lawsuits.
People will pay a premium for nonstop flights to avoid the hassle and risks of a connection.
If Delta sells me a ticket from Columbus to Portland with a connection in Minneapolis, they’re competing against all the other airlines that will take me from Columbus to Portland with a connection in Chicago or Denver or San Francisco. Minneapolis isn’t important to me (so they think). But if Delta sells me a ticket from Columbus to Minneapolis, they know they’re the only airline with a nonstop flight, and will price it accordingly. That competitive pressure and lack thereof might occasionally result in a Columbus-Portland ticket selling for less than a Columbus-Minneapolis ticket.
To be clear, there are no nonstop flights between Lansing and Tokyo. If I want to fly between those two cities, there’s going to be a layover in either Detroit or Chicago. So the cheapness of a multi-leg itinerary between those two cities wouldn’t be because they’re trying ty compete against non-stop itineraries.
Yep, airlines do what they can to fight this, so you wouldn’t want to skip anything but the final leg of the whole itinerary. In the present case, Ann Arbor is geographically somewhere between Lansing and Detroit, so it wouldn’t be that much more hassle to take a bus to Lansing for the outbound trip, and then during the return trip, just take a bus/taxi from Detroit to Ann Arbor and skip the final Detroit → Lansing leg; it’d be the final leg of the whole itinerary, so not much the airline could do at that point.
Re: checked bags:
Since Tokyo → Detroit is an international flight, I’m required to pick up my checked bags and haul them through customs myself. At that point I could just skip re-checking them for the domestic Detroit → Lansing leg.
It can happen that splitting a trip into parts is cheaper than buying a ticket for the whole journey, even if you stay on the train in the intermediate station.
For example, trains from London to Manchester all pass through Crewe, but buying a ticket from London to Crewe and another between Crewe and Manchester is cheaper than London > Manchester.
There used to be cases where the return fare was lower than the single fare, but I think they stopped that.
I have no idea why this works, except that they might want to encourage people to use some routes over others.
There are websites that will do the work for you and sell you the tickets for a small charge.
Sure, but if they’re competing against a different airline’s multi-leg layover — with an otherwise-irrelevant stop in a different city — the incentives I mentioned remain in play.
A variation of this is the Saturday stay over deal. I had a project that had me flying to a city every Monday and flying home every Friday for 2 years. The lack of a Saturday stay over meant the ticket cost several hundred dollars more. I started in my target city and bought a round trip ticket flying home on Friday and back on Monday. Presto! Saturday stay over every week. Over the course of the project this saved tens of thousands of dollars.
For a trip I’m taking in a few weeks, the cheapest total (booked through Priceline) was actually on two different airlines for the outbound and return. Though I doubt I could have skiplagged that-- Bozeman, MT isn’t an intermediate stop for anything.
I think the root cause of all of these pricing oddities is price discrimination. For anyone selling any product or service, there’s some absolute minimum they can charge and still make a profit. If it’s a choice between making a sale at just above that point or not making a sale at all, they’d rather make the sale at that price. But they don’t want to just set the normal price at that point, because there are a lot of people who are willing to pay more, and they want those people to pay as much as they’re willing to. So what you do is have multiple prices, so different people pay different prices, often with some extra level of hassle required for the lower price. The most common example is coupons: Some people care enough about the price of a box of cereal that they’re willing to dig up the dollar-off coupon, but some people will just buy it without the coupon.
This price discrimination effect is amplified for airlines, because not all seats cost the airline the same amount. If you have enough customers to add an extra flight, all of a sudden you’re adding an entire plane worth of cost: An airliner flying with one passenger costs nearly as much as the same airliner flying with five hundred passengers. So once you have any given planeload started, you really, really want to finish filling it, but you absolutely don’t want to overfill it, because that costs you a lot. Which is also why they’re willing to offer such large compensation packages to people they have to bump from overbooking: Two free tickets in the future plus a $500 bonus, or whatever, is still a lot cheaper than having to run an extra flight.
A DTW-HND round trip on Delta One, non-stop in each direction, costs about $8500.
A LAN-HND round trip on Delta One costs about $5000; it includes a layover at DTW in each direction, and uses the same flights between DTW and HND as the aforementioned $8500 DTW-HND itinerary.
That doesn’t really answer the question, and has nothing to do with skiplagging as you have decribed it or as I have understood it.
Skiplagging (or should it be skiplegging?) would be if you could fly Lansing to Tokyo with a stop in Detroit for cheaper than you could fly from Lansing to Detroit. Or are you talking about the reverse? Pay to fly from Tokyo to Lansing via Detroit, then just skip out on the last leg and stay in Detroit?
People are calling it skiplagging, I guess by corruption from skiplegging, which would make more sense.
And yes, I think the only way you could pull off skiplagging on the itinerary I’m describing is for the very last leg: get off the flight from Japan in Detroit, and don’t get on the plane to Lansing.