Since you can only do this in one direction, you can’t really look at prices for round-trips - if you book a round trip from Detroit to Japan planning to get off the return flight from Japan in Detroit and not get on the flight to Lansing, you will have the problem of the whole itinerary being canceled when you don’t board the initial Lansing to Detroit flight. The only way that would work is if you drive from Detroit to Lansing to take the first flight. If you try to do it in reverse and book a round-trip from Japan to Lansing , your return flight will be cancelled when you don’t get on the flight from Detroit to Lansing. To avoid these issues, you would have to book two separate one-way tickets - and that might not have as much of a price advantage.
Price discrimination is a factor too, - maybe most of the people flying from Lansing to Tokyo are going on a vacation and will choose another destination if this one is to expensive, while those going from Detroit are mostly going on business and therefore less price-sensitive.
And hubs might have higher fares due to one airline having so much of the business. Back when Cincinnati was a Delta hub, budget-conscious travelers from Cincinnati would drive to Columbus/Dayton/Louisville/Indianapolis and sometimes fly back to Cincinnati to catch a connecting flight because the fares were that much lower.
Non-stop carries a hefty premium. And the longer the non-stop portion, the heftier the premium. So, … if you can fake out the system to turn your non-stop flight into a one-stop flight then the price drops a lot.
This is not new; it’s been going on since the advent of hub-and-spoke in the late 1970s. “Phantom leg” was the traditional term of art. I think “skiplagging” is some wannabe influencer trolling for clicks with a new word for an old idea.
The airlines have lots of ways to detect this. And they will fight you tooth and nail if you do it. People are routinely banned by carriers from traveling certain routes if they’re deemed to be repeat offenders.
There’s also an industry consortium that handles all aspects of interline ticketing. If your name gets on their “he’s a scammer list”, you can expect to pay higher fares everywhere all the time.
I guess the point here is they lock you into flying Delta to Tokyo, whereas if you were sitting in Detroit you could pick multiple airlines… and from Lansing I assume you could fly to a number of different airlines’ hubs.
I’ve also seen price wars where an airline will temporarily offer a low rate to prevent another airline from coming into that market and stealing the business. To stop Bob’sAir from coming into Lansing, make it cheaper to fly Delta than Bob can tolerate. Customers elsewhere on the system make up for the loss.
That seems to be pretty standard when everything is priced on individual one-ways, as seems to be the case. My most recent trip was the same. IMHO owadays is the most sane airline pricing compared to previous decades.
As I mentioned, my friend did the same. A travel agent warned him that the airline could cancel his tickets if they figured out what he was doing, since in some arcane way it violated the terms of the ticket. (Never happened - I guess the number of people doing that was a lot less than the one-time one-week business trippers).
What does this have to do with skipping the last leg? If someone is in Lansing and wants to go to Detroit, the cost is much cheaper than the $5000 price to purchase a Lansing-Detroit-Tokyo ticket while just skipping the last leg and staying in Detroit. You seem to be confusing “skipping the last leg” with “skipping the first leg”. The latter isn’t possible as the entire flight would be cancelled. The former might be possibly cheaper somehow in some situations, but certainly not universally so. I’d love to see an example.
Do you have any actual examples of where someone needing to go from A to B is able to get there cheaper by purchasing a ticket from A to B to C?
Why do they care so much? I understand they’re getting played by the customer, but that’s what happens when you offer sales pricing on products. I understand they will say they could have made more money if you didn’t do that, but they didn’t think that was likely to happen or they wouldn’t have offered the low price in the first place.
And the security issues are eliminated if you just tell them your plans when you check in on the first leg.
I was flying from Phoenix to Dayton. My plane stopped in Cincinnati. I never got off the plane, and as soon as everyone going to Cinci got off, we took off for Dayton. There was no direct Phx-Dayton flight at all.
The ticket Phx-Dayton was, say, $700. The ticket Phx-Cin was, say, $800. It made no damn sense! I was literally the same flight!
Skiplagging is the practice of booking an itinerary where the stopover is the actual and intended destination of the traveler. Using our ‘point A to point B’ phrasing, a passenger would book a ticket that takes them from point A to point C, with a stopover at point B. The passenger’s actual destination is point B and leaves the airport at this layover, leaving their seat empty on the B-to-C portion of the journey.
You asked for an example, and it’s right there in my OP: I want to get from HND to DTW, and it’s cheaper if I purchase a ticket from HND to DTW to LAN. If I were into skiplagging, I would forego the final leg (DTW → LAN) of the entire itinerary and just take a bus from DTW to my home in Ann Arbor.
Consider what I wrote in #8 above: the profitability of a route might depend upon people paying the full price for the direct flight. The A to C via B option is only sustainable to the extent that A to B and B to C are independently generating or at least close to generating enough revenue to recoup losses. The A to C via B crowd is just there to fill empty seats and generate just a little more money over the variable per passenger costs once the fixed costs have been recouped.
If, however, you have passengers routinely taking advantage of the discounted A to C via B rate to get a really cheap A to B flight, then they are potentially destroying the profitability of the A to B route, which would in turn mean that neither A to B, B to C, or A to C via B would be sustainable.
And remember: the proper point of comparison for A to C via B isn’t A to B or B to C, it’s A to C: if you want people to put up with a longer travel itinerary to get to the same destination (C), then you have to charge them less for it than the direct flight.
At this point, I really wish snopes hadn’t obliterated his forums, because I actually did a really detailed analysis of this phenomenon, like, 10 years ago.
Competitive pricing is a gamble. They can’t always win the game, Obviously, they want to win as often as possible but seems to me they’re missing opportunities if this practice is attractive enough for them to notice it.
The nature of the total operation creates certain opportunities for arbitrage. Arbitrage that is prohibited by the terms of the contract of carriage, but that consumers try to get away with anyhow. The airlines have systems to detect and prevent arbitrage from succeeding. Like any preventative system, it isn’t 100% successful. If only because would-be arbitrageurs are such devious clever sorts.
Airlines make more money leaving the arbitrage possibility out there but mostly prevented from being used than they would by altering prices to make the arbitrage possibility smaller enough that no one would bother.
The airlines practically invented Operations Research as a science to max perform this stuff. They have top men working on it. Top. Men.
There’s no low-hanging fruit their pricing and scheduling algorithms have overlooked. Maybe 50 years ago, but not now.
That’s not what you said in your OP. You priced tickets from DTW to HDN and it was $8000. Then you priced tickets starting in Lansing, then DTW to HDN and it was only $5000.
But now you’re saying what you wanted was to get from HND to DTW. So what you need to do is price a ticket FROM HDN to DTW, and then one from HDN to LAN that goes through DTW. That’s not at all what you did in the OP.
Round trip FROM Japan? So Japan to Detroit and back to Japan? That still doesn’t make since to add Lansing. You found cheaper tickets for that trip by adding Lansing to the mix? I doubt it.
Are you just talking about wanting to go from Detroit round trip to Japan and back? But you want to have your tickets start in Lansing? Well, then you have to drive to Lansing first, or else all of your ticket will be cancelled. The cost and inconvenience of starting in Lansing will not be inconsequential. How will you get there to start your journey? You can’t take a car, because if you’re going to stop at Detroit in the very end, you will have left your car in Lansing.
You could make it clearer by stating the trip you intend to take. From what city to which and back? What is the A-B-A? And then show an example of how adding a C would make it cheaper. You haven’t done that. I think the factual answer to “How does skiplagging work?” is that “It doesn’t.”
A long time ago, I knew someone who lived with his family in Zurich and had a temporary teaching job in Dusseldorf. He discovered by looking at the airline published rate tables that a ticket from London to Zurich followed by 25 round trips between Zurich and Dusseldorf was much cheaper than 25 RTs between Zurich and Dusseldorf. So he got a one-way to London and then purchased that ticket. He didn’t conceal what he was doing; the airlines were trapped by their own rate books. He eventually ended up making a business as a travel agent and figuring out these deals for his customers. He knew the rate books better than the airline ticket agents and when they saw his hand in a deal, they stopped arguing.
The OP is in Ann Arbor and DTW and LAN are about the same distance from home.
The OP started by pricing round-trip tickets DTW-HDN and back by HDN-DTW. Then they found they could save $3500 by booking LAN-DTW-HDN and back HDN-DTW-LAN but skipping the DTW-LAN flight and driving home directly from DTW.
This has been around roughly forever. I’ve done it for realz once, did the one-way at each end/roundtrip in middle a few times. The latter is going to be hard for them to argue with – you’re not abandoning anything, so I don’t think they have any grounds to complain.
I also had a trip IAD-HOU-PIT-IAD at one point. There were no nonstops HOU-PIT, but there was a routing with a plane change at IAD. So I booked that, on the theory that if they screwed me on the connection, I’d just go home. (They didn’t, so I didn’t.)
Very weird changing planes at my home airport, which I know so well!
The pricing may be different due to a rise in popularity of a given destination.
Let’s say the Olympics are in City-A. Loads of people will want to fly to City-A and ticket prices rise.
However, the airline has an existing connecting route to City-B through City-A. Been there for years. Relatively few people want to go to City-B during the Olympics so prices are cheaper. Clever people book to City-B and get off at City-A.
I have heard airlines may ban people who do this (no cite, grain of salt…sorry). It is not illegal though (that I am aware of, IANAL). It may be against the terms you agree to when you buy the ticket though.
That said, websites exist to help you skiplag:
I’d be willing to bet you can get away with it unless you are a frequent flier and skiplag a lot. Get on their radar of annoying passengers and they might find a way to punish you for doing that (like the guy who bought lifetime tickets and abused the system so they found a way to stop him).
Checked bags would be an issue but airlines have drilled it into most travelers to use carry-on luggage to avoid extra fees so probably not a big deal for most people.
Thank you. Then I suppose that would work. I don’t even think the checked bags would be a problem because you have pick them up and recheck in Detroit anyway. So, you could just pick up your bags and not recheck them. Might raise a few flags, though.
