The Travel Hack That Can Get You Kicked off a Plane

Imagine you are looking to book a flight from New York to San Diego. You go to one of seemingly infinite travel sites and compare different options, and there are two that pique your interest. The first is a direct flight for $500 (I’m making this up; I have no idea what the price should be) and the second costs $400, but is a bit longer and involves a stopover in Los Angeles. Which do you select? That, of course, if specific to your budget, timeline, and other preferences — both options are perfectly reasonable.

But let’s say that, in the course of booking that flight, you decide you’d rather go to Los Angeles. You check the same website and see the cheapest flight — direct or otherwise — is $500. That’s weird, because for $100 less, you could book that New York to LA to San Diego flight and just disembark in Los Angeles, right?

Wrong. Well, maybe. It’s complicated.

Booking that New York to San Diego flight but getting off in LA is an example of a scheme called “hidden-city ticketing” or “skiplaggng.” Most airlines don’t price flights based on the distance you travel, but rather on complicated models that I’ll not explain here (in large part because I don’t understand them!). As a result, airlines don’t make it easy to find these “hidden city” fares that are cheaper than direct flights without the additional leg. But in 2013, a frequent flier named Aktarer Zaman decided to do something about that. He founded Skiplagged.com, a website that makes it easy-ish to find these types of fares.

And as a result, a few of the airlines sued Zaman and his website. In 2015, United Airlines and online flight booker Orbitz filed a lawsuit claiming that Zaman was engaged in “deceptive behavior” and “unfair competition,” but as CNN reported, Orbitz settled and United lost on a procedural technicality. (Today, the Skiplagged website brags that “Our flights are so cheap, United sued us… but we won.”) Both Southwest and American Airlines also brought lawsuits against the website, but neither was successful in shutting it down.

As for passengers, you’re not going to go to jail if you put yourself on a hidden-city itinerary, but you may find yourself receiving the ire of the airline in other ways. As the New York Times reported in 2003, “the practice is strictly prohibited by airlines in their contracts of carriage. And carriers have shown an erratic but heavy hand in administering punishment for those caught, eliminating a skiplagger’s frequent flier miles in one instance and suing a passenger in another. [One flyer] said that American barred his son from traveling with the carrier for three years.” In some cases, if the airline detects what you’re up to when you arrive for your flight, they’ll prevent you from boarding entirely.

Oh, and the airlines may sue you. As travel analyst Henry Harteveldt told NPR, “If you’ve done this repeatedly, [the airline] is going to say you owe us money. They may be willing to settle for a certain number of cents on the dollar. Maybe they want to collect all of it. But airlines can and will take steps to protect themselves.” But the practice isn’t always easy to detect, so a lot of flyers get away with it.

So if you want to try it, caveat flyer!

Bonus fact: Most American airlines do not require you to purchase a ticket for a child under the age of two, even though it’s safer for the child to be in a (paid-for) seat than on their parent’s lap. And that seems strange, because why would an airline want to forgo some money to create a safer flying experience? The answer, according to a 2010 FAA report (pdf), is unfortunately kind of morbid: “requiring [a ticket] for children under two would significantly increase the price of family air travel for a small targeted population small, targeted population” which, in turn, “would cause some families to divert to the highways.” Driving is much more dangerous than flying, and moving all of those flyers to the roads would result in approximately 60 more deaths.

From the Archives: Pudding One Over: Why pudding can get you free flights. (Or, could, before they figured it out.)