A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers | Hacker News Reader

A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers

wsj.com

69 pointsprostoalex52 comments

Maybe I can’t read, but the article talks a lot about the “fifth freedom”, but doesn’t explicitly tell you what it is.

There’s a short little section that go “some airlines are allowed to do this strange thing, especially if a fuel stop is involved”. But it doesn’t explicitly say what the fifth freedom is, just alludes to it.

Spot on; this is just such sloppy reporting. It also reads like it was written by the airlines involved in order to generate interest; a la PGs "submarine" blog post.

They also compare prices to Milan with Rome. Milan is about 600 km more north than Rome, its about a 6 hour drive if everything works out. Nobody who wants to go to Rome would fly to Milan.

After high school I went to visit friends on the Adriatic coast of Italy, then we went to the Aeolian Islands (we summited Stromboli which may not be allowed anymore).

Anyway, I had very little money so I took a flight that was an option to fly from the "west coast of the US" to "western Europe". I waited for a nearby US departure since, our ground transportation is difficult, but flew into Paris, then took an overnight train to Bologna.

When I left, I departed from Milan. The difficult part was that the shady company organizing the tickets told me the wrong Milan airport, but getting to Milan is easy. You could even take a train from Messina, since the train itself gets on the ferry from Sicily to the Italian peninsula. From Rome, Milan is only a three hour train ride with spacious seating and large windows to watch the scenery roll by. If you're on a tight budget with a flexible schedule, you can go a pretty long distance by train before it seems like any inconvenience at all.

Fifth freedom is the right for an airline to carry revenue traffic between two countries, neither of which are its home country. For example BA carrying paying passengers between Singapore and Sydney, or Singapore Airlines carrying them from Frankfurt to New York. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air

More important, 5th freedom is not a "low fare loophole" relying on an "old treaty".

Not all countries/stops allow 5th freedom rights in all cases.

Sounds like just journalistic exaggeration

Exaggeration is right. There is really nothing special about these routes with respect to fares. Only that perhaps there is more competition.

They are famous among aviation enthusiasts simply as a way to get access to airlines that one might otherwise have to travel great distances to try.

What drives down their fares is this:

If an airline based in A is running a flight A>B>C, they can’t feed any pax to B except from A, or carry pax further than C (without interlining). So there’s a bit more of an incentive to sell tickets B>C while other airlines flying that route can sell tickets to a much wider array of passengers (coming from pre-B (but not A) or going post-C).

You're right, and the fare is cheaper, but there are also downsides (usually frequency). Product varies a lot as well, the reasons for choosing an Emirates 5th freedom product are usually different from picking a different (5th freedom) airline on a route.

And more to go wrong since a replacement plane is a big ways away!

Example - Ethiopian Airlines flies from Dublin to Los Angeles. Dublin is, I believe, a "fuel stop" since the flight originates in Ethiopia.

To those wondering, Dublin is on the straight line path from Ethiopia to LA.

Well, technically, Dublin is on or near the Great Circle route from Ethiopia to LA.

Which is the straight line path on a sphere.

Which is called orthodromic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle

as opposed to loxodromic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxodromic_navigation

Here's a graphic

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=ADD-LAX

I have to say its still unintuitive, I need a globe :/

Yep, but you have to compare it with this one:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=ADD-DUB-LAX

to see how close Dublin is to the theorical route you just posted.

I just assumed that most people would know that Dublin was on the blob, just off the coast of the slightly larger blob, just off the coast of (mainland) Europe. Which on the scales involved, is close enough.

Another example is Air India flying Chicago to Frankfurt Germany.

Yes it's one example. Though that ORD-DEL flight seems to be operated directly now

To be more exact (if not pedantic) the 5th freedom would apply if Air India could sell tickets and take passengers only for the ORD-FRA and FRA-ORD legs and Frankfurt is not merely a fuel stop.

They can and they do book ORD-FRA/FRA-ORD. My family has flown this route before.

> Some airlines are allowed to carry customers between two non-native countries, usually when a fuel stop is involved. It’s called the fifth freedom. Established with an international treaty in 1944, the nine aviation freedoms lay out what commercial airlines can and can’t do throughout the world.

This paragraph is worded a bit confusingly, but it was pretty clear to me: the fifth freedom is the fifth of nine aviation freedoms from a treaty signed in 1944.

Airline 1 from Country A

Airline 2 from Country B

Airline 1 is allowed to fly from A to B, refuel in B, and then fly from B to C. But the fifth freedom allows Airline 1 to pick up people in country B and provide them cheap flights to country C, thus competing with Airline 2, which is native to country B.

It could be entirely possible that my understanding is incorrect, though... but that's what I got from their explanation.

I do completely agree with other posters that this is thinly-veiled advertising, though. This stands out with their Japan flights for me, since I live in Japan and occasionally look for tickets.

It's interesting that they point the price for Osaka-Honolulu because it's surprisingly low (~80% cheaper), but they conveniently neglect to mention that the Tokyo-LA flight is only 10-15% cheaper than a domestic airline.

Yep. Basically these flights are legs of flights with a stopover at intermediate destinations, and airlines will sell tickets all the way or for both individual legs at whatever price they think will maximise their revenue. For example I once flew London to Bangkok with EVA Airways of Taiwan, whilst most of the other passengers on the flight continued to Taipei (and some other passengers would have bought Bangkok to Taipei tickets). You can fly London-Taipei nonstopThe stopping route probably suited the airline as they had some demand from London and Bangkok to Taipei but not necessarily enough to fill separate aircraft from both destinations with the same frequency. Same goes for a Madrid to Quito flight stopping over at Bogota I once took - the aircraft could definitely have flown nonstop to Quito, but the airline would have found the more convoluted route easier to make a profit on due to relatively low demand to get to Ecuador.

Sometimes this means a better deal than shorter haul flights so the airline can fill seats on their less popular leg, sometimes it's actually worse (especially if you're a frequent flyer more likely to have miles or offers with your local carrier). As the article points out, stopping flights also getting rarer as aircraft range increases and passenger demand increases because most people would prefer to fly London to Sydney without an hour in Singapore, and airlines find it much easier to fill flights to individual international destinations.

This video explains it well: https://youtu.be/thqbjA2DC-E

The five freedoms of aviation are:

1) The right to fly over a foreign country without landing.

2) The right to refuel or carry out maintenance in a foreign country without embarking or disembarking passengers or cargo.

3) The right to fly from one's own country to another country.

4) The right to fly from another country to one's own.

5) The right to fly between two foreign countries on a flight originating or ending in one's own country.

This video has a lot of good info on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqbjA2DC-E

And wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air

Hm, I think this article might possibly be astroturfing/stealth advertising Emirates, maybe some others.

It says due to a treaty they are the cheapest flight from New York to Italy, at $988, compared to United charging $3328.

Checking some flight sites I see Emirates prominently featured at the top of pages as a sponsored result. Their costs are not the lowest. And $3328 is not a normal lowest priced ticket, I wonder how many dates they had to look at and other cheaper flights they had to ignore to list that United fare as one of the comparisons. Definitely some cherry picking going on on that one.

I found Oct 16-Oct 30 from New York to Rome for $365. Granted outbound is American and inbound is Finnair makes a stop in Helsinki with a 12 hr layover. But hey for $365...

In any case I don't believe it's true that flights with the characteristics in the article are always the cheapest, or maybe not even most of the time.

It doesn't really seem like a loophole anyway. Singapore Airlines flying from Singapore to Honolulu to San Francisco is obviously a legitimate flight. If some people only want the Honolulu leg there's nothing wrong with that, it's not a loophole or trick.

A list of routes like these:

https://www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au/fifth-freedom-rou...

Really? The author touts how amazing a $900 fare is (MXP-JFK) but a quick search on Expedia returns the same flight, two ways, non stop, Iberia/American for $322. And I entered a random date. Depressingly bad journalism.

Why is there a requirement for only flying from/to the airline's country?

What is stopping any airline from simply opening fully owned subsidiaries in every country they want to fly from/to?

Or alternatively effectively doing the same by leasing their aircraft on a hourly basis to another airline from the desired country?

Country’s ownership laws, branding, cost of doing business. I can add numerous more reasons.

Regulatory capture

Not sure how this is regulatory capture, given that the treaty was signed when most airlines were a government monopoly and frequently government owned.

So this is more about protecting a local facility.

> What is stopping any airline from simply opening fully owned subsidiaries in every country they want to fly from/to?

Historically countries would have their own airlines (more or less state owned) and thus the regulatory framework is build around ensuring monopoly rights for the one (today multiple) local airlines.

A subsidiary fully owned by a foreign entity would under this framework not to be considered local.

I can only give some example for Germany. Lufthansa, the local carrier, uses a special kind of stock ("Vinkulierte Namensaktien") [1], where each owner is actually tracked (citizenship, name, ...) and everyones ability of buying shares is subject to Lufthansa validating that with this change in ownership, the company will still be majority owned by Germans.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinkulation

A fully owned subsidiary would (depending on the laws of the country) not be considered 'local'.

See complicated tracking of ownership of European Airlines to meet local ownership requirements.

At least any European airline can operate on any part of Europe. One of the problems with brexit, is that with the merge of British Airways and Iberia, Iberia may lose the rights to take of from Madrid for all their latam flights.

So I assume if I search for flights on any aggregator site, these will show up? It's not like they're secret or anything?

Yes, they do. Not all cheap flights show up on all aggregators though - the ticketing data feeds used by airlines are arcane and very complex, and some aggregators ignore some corner cases, meaning some good tickets might not be shown.

I have used https://skiplagged.com that takes advantage of this rule but takes it slightly further. You book the entire flight but don't get on the second leg of your flight. Occasionally it comes out cheaper than if you just book the first leg on the same flight.

Hidden city ticketing isn't the same thing and can result in losing access to one's frequent flier account or even being banned from an airline. In the US I'd only risk it on Southwest.

Are there any reports of anyone being banned or punished in any way for this? (with the exception of bloggers/youtubers who are advertising the practice)

I did that two years ago when flying from Los Angeles . Not to save money but travel plans had changed so it was better to get off in Amsterdam instead of continuing to London. It took a lot of convincing to get the airline to stop the bags in Amsterdam. Finally they did it but we got a stern warning to never do this again. Not sure if there would have been a ban but they really really really didn’t like it.

That is with bags though, with understandable is more work for them.

Possible. Although I don’t really understand why it’s more work.

They have to manually intercept your bags from being transferred to the next flight.

Are you sure? At check in they always put a destination sticker on the bags. In this case they just put Amsterdam instead of London on the bag. It didn’t seem to be much of a hassle.

You normally check in bags for your final destination when all legs of the trip are with the same airline

I don't think it's about more work. I was in a similar situation where we didn't have any checked luggage and simply wanted to let the company know not to wait for us for the second leg of the flight. They made a scene and said that if we don't show up, we'll be breaking some agreement with them and there might be consequences.

My understanding is that they are hell-bent on discouraging people from buying cheaper multi-hop flight tickets for one hop only.

Probably a dozen posts on FlyerTalk alone per year about people receiving a letter telling them never to do it again, being assessed a bill for lost revenue, or having their FF account banned.

I thought this was effectively banned because it caused flights manifests to be incorrect for the 2nd leg and also had tax / duty implications?

I doubt that. They don't mind if you miss a simple single flight.

I'm missing the part of the article where it explains why this leads to lower fares? just because the native airlines on either end of a specific route don't compete with each other?

geez, mark as (2018) please

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