In an era of high airfares, travelers will often get creative to find cheaper flights—and while that craftiness can be admirable, it’s also a bit risky. Case in point: A strategy known as “skiplagging” has been making headlines after a teenager who was flying with American Airlines last week from Florida to New York, and planned to get off in the connecting city of Charlotte, North Carolina, was prohibited from boarding the original flight and asked to rebook a direct flight to Charlotte.
At the airport in Florida, when Logan Parsons presented his North Carolina driver’s license, an American Airlines agent “kind of got out of him that he was planning to disboard in Charlotte and [was] not going to make the connecting flight,” Hunter Parsons, Logan’s father, told local news agency Queen City News. The agent canceled the ticket and made the family buy a direct flight to Charlotte.
Here’s what travelers should know about skiplagging, including the risks and airlines’ official policies regarding the practice.
Skiplagging, which is also known as hidden city ticketing, is the practice of booking a connecting flight that is lower priced than a nonstop flight and not flying the final leg (or legs) of the flight.
“Plain and simply, hidden city ticketing is a way to find a direct flight without the direct flight price tag. Stumbling on a cheaper connecting flight that just so happens to stop in your desired city means you can technically get to where you want to go for considerably less,” explains Katy Nastro, spokesperson and travel expert with flight deals newsletter Going.com.
Nastro offered this example. Say, for example, you wanted to fly from New York to Los Angeles, and the direct flight cost $114, but there is a flight to Dallas from New York with a connection in Los Angeles that costs only $84. “You have just found a hidden city ticket, which means you can turn a connecting flight to Dallas into a direct flight to Los Angeles, hop out at your connection and pay 26 percent less than you would have paid to fly direct.”
You can, of course, scour travel booking sites like Google Flights or Kayak in search of skiplag options, but as you can imagine, it’s a bit of challenge because you are actually searching for a destination city that doesn’t match your true destination. So, using Nastro’s example above, you would need to search numerous flights from New York to destinations other than Los Angeles to discover whether there are some cheaper flights that fly through Los Angeles. The more you search, the better you are likely to become at identifying which routes typically have specific layovers.
The main resource for finding these flights more easily is a website called Skiplagged that does the work for you.
The website maxtravelz.com is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.
In the wake of Covid, travel insurance sales have spiked with the rebound in travel as people seek to protect their investments against flight delays and cancellations, extreme weather events and the persistence of the virus. But travel insurance is complicated with a range of benefits, inclusions and prices. Here’s what you need to know before you buy.
Are lengthy tarmac delays happening more often? It certainly feels that way, with several frustrating incidents having gone viral in recent times in which passengers were stuck on planes for hours before their flights were eventually canceled.
Four capital cities stand on the banks of the Danube, but only one has the river at its heart. Before Budapest’s official unification on 17 November 1873, the royal city of Buda looked out from its castle-topped hill across the river towards popular Pest on the plain. The opening of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge in 1849 had laid the ground-work, permanently linking both halves of the Hungarian capital. This stone-and-iron landmark has been closed for two years for renovation: its expected autumn reopening will be the most fitting present the city could gift itself on its 150th birthday. What’s more, visiting well-wishers will find some exciting new hotels to stay in.
It’s the final moments gearing up for takeoff, when you notice your seatmate is replying to text messages on their cell phone—which they clearly haven’t put into airplane mode yet. Cue the spike of fear. Are they really just breaking the rules? And most importantly: Is this inconsiderate person going to mess with the plane signals and kill us all?
Planning a road trip this summer? For the sake of safety and peace of mind, your own and others’, add this to the pre-departure to-do list: a review of your driving habits. After all, while there’s nothing you can do to change other drivers’ bad habits, you are at least in control of your own.
Travel rewards can be an excellent way to save money when you use miles and points correctly. The average credit card rewards point is worth one cent. But some cards, such as business rewards credit cards, offer more bang for your buck. With these suggestions, your rewards points can be worth at least twice the value. Let’s take a look to see how.
A lot of terrible things can happen on a plane: a runway crash, mid-flight mechanical issues, a medical emergency. An anxious mind might run through them before take off. But how often do you worry about a fellow passenger committing sexual assault?
Have you ever booked a last-minute trip because you suddenly realized you had a few days to spare? If you have, you’re not alone. More travelers than ever before are participating in the latest travel trend: Spontaneous vacations.
On the 35th day of the U.S. partial government shutdown, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced a staff shortage in air traffic controllers and that flights to at least one airport were halted, causing delays. Flights through La Guardia, Newark, and Philadelphia airports were the first to be affected, around the same time that the FAA announced the sick outs.