Skiplagged: This Airline Just Sued a Customer for “Cheating” with Hidden-City Ticketing

27.07.2023 - 18:13 / smartertravel.com

How would you like to get home from your trip and receive a bill for $2,300—plus interest—for an $840 plane trip that you’ve already paid for? That’s the amount Lufthansa recently sued a passenger for, after the customer skipped (“skiplagged,” in industry parlance) the last leg of his flight itinerary. It’s a story that has other hack-oriented travelers wondering: Is skiplagging legal?

Lufthansa’s aggressive response is the latest in a series of occasional airline attempts to stop travelers from using a well-known ticketing gimmick to cut trip costs. The trick, also called hidden-city ticketing, is booking a cheaper itinerary with a layover—when the layover is actually your destination.

In 2018, United threatened a skiplagged passenger with reporting him to a collection agency and canceling his frequent flyer status unless he paid the $3,000 fare difference. Other airlines have done the same in the past, too.

The hidden-city airfare gimmick has various nicknames—skiplagged flights, point-beyond booking, and throwaway ticketing. There’s even an airfare search engine site dedicated to finding these types of fares, called Skiplagged. The basic idea is simple: Sometimes the nonstop airfare to a particular destination is much higher than a fare to a separate city that includes a stopover in your final destination. In that case, a traveler heading to the first city can buy the connecting fare to the second city and skip the journey’s final leg.

For example, let’s say I want to fly from my small home airport in Oregon to San Francisco, a distance of 329 air miles. United flies the only nonstops on this route, and no other airlines fly from here to any other Bay Area airports. United charges $166 for a one-way nonstop San Francisco ticket, but just $67 for a San Francisco-connecting Seattle ticket, a total of 1,008 miles. So if I buy the ticket to Seattle and don’t show up for the connecting San Francisco-Seattle ticket, I can fly nonstop to San Francisco for $99 less than the price of a nonstop ticket—and collect more miles. The Lufthansa traveler, for his part, bought a ticket from Seattle to Oslo via Frankfurt, but didn’t take the final Frankfurt-to-Oslo flight, opting to remain in Frankfurt instead.

Airlines price tickets this way because they can. When one airline has a monopoly route—or a dominant schedule on a route—it can charge high fares. This fare pattern typically applies to and from many “fortress hubs,” an airport where one airline dominates the bulk of the flights (like United at San Francisco). But airlines also typically match competitors’ prices on connecting routes. In the case of my Delta flight from Oregon,