Airlines Hate ‘Skiplagging.’ Meet the Man Who Helps Travelers Pull It Off.

12.11.2024 - 10:37 / nytimes.com

Finding a great flight deal often involves diligently tracking and setting price alerts, comparing miles or points programs, signing up for new credit cards, flying out of an inconvenient airport at an inconvenient time, and more.

Some travelers will go further by booking connections and sometimes even purposely skipping them. This workaround, called skiplagging or hidden-city flying, means purchasing an itinerary with a layover that is the intended destination and skipping the last leg of a flight. Some travelers will employ this tactic when it’s cheaper than buying a direct flight.

Aktarer Zaman founded a website called Skiplagged in 2013 to help travelers unearth these deals. Skiplagging, however, is prohibited by airlines, and carriers will occasionally punish travelers who do it, clawing back frequent flier mileage and even suing passengers. United Airlines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have sued Mr. Zaman’s company over the years, and a lawsuit filed by American is ongoing.

But in a conversation with The Times, Mr. Zaman, 32, said more than 12 million people have used his website in the last 12 months. He said that skiplagging offers significant value to cost-conscious travelers and he’s invigorated to empower them.

Initially, it was just curiosity. I’d just graduated from college, had a job lined up at Amazon in Seattle and was looking up flights from New York City. I saw that it was half the price to fly from New York to Seattle, with a layover in San Francisco, than to fly directly from New York to San Francisco. I then went into a rabbit hole trying to understand what was going on.

Airlines operate on a hub-and-spoke model, which means they price on market and not by distance. It’s been like this for decades. So in this example, the airline had a strong control over the New York-to-San Francisco market, but maybe not over the New York-to-Seattle market.