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Comment by sys32768 | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip: Always buy a round-trip ticket when you plan to flee fraud. It looks better in court and in newspapers, and nobody will force you to take the trip back.

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I'm going to go ahead and guess that any international travel plans – whether round trip or not – made by a convicted felon awaiting sentencing is going to raise flags and will be blocked by the government.

The only possible redeeming feature of the round trip plan is that, when the government inevitably finds out about it, at least you have a slightly easier time explaining that you’d planned on coming back. I mean it is the thinnest probably-electroplated silver lining in the sense that they probably won’t believe you but at least there’s some minuscule evidence in your favor.

This falls into the category of “cheap and dumb criminals.”

Similar to the first World Trade Center bombers that tried to get their deposit back on the rental truck they blew up.

This is actually the first time I've heard that. Is this urban legend (it is funny as hell), or did it actually happen?

"Two of these pieces bore a vehicle identification number (VIN) that the FBI traced to a rental agency in Jersey City, N.J. The man who rented the truck, Mohammed Salameh, had reported it stolen.

Seeking a refund of his $400 deposit, Salameh repeatedly returned to the Jersey City rental agency where he rented the Ryder van. Working with the rental office personnel, FBI agents arrested Salameh." [0]

So, yes, it really did happen. At least he reported it stolen first. I cannot believe that did not eliminate him as a suspect as that was such a well thought out alibi. Besides, how much was that $400 refund in comparison to the money that Osama surely must have paid him to carry out the deed.

[0]https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/1993-world-trade-ce...

I suspect it was less about the $400 than following through on the alibi and hoping to slow the investigation down a little. I'm more surprised they didn't just buy a cheap truck in New Jersey.

> Pro tip: Always buy a round-trip ticket when you plan to flee fraud. It looks better in court

Another pro tip: round-trip tickets are often cheaper than one-way tickets, even if you don't plan to return!

The "return" can be a long, long way in the future, too.

This may happen once in a while due to some algorithm weirdness, but it is absolutely not "often" the case.

> This may happen once in a while due to some algorithm weirdness, but it is absolutely not "often" the case

It's completely predictable, in fact I checked this claim at Google Flights before posting.

Say you want to fly from LON to NYC, next week, on OneWorld airlines, nonstop. Check the price for a one-way, then check the price when you add a return six months out.

No. It depends on the market, but if it is what's known as a "round-trip" market (typically international itineraries), it shifts to become "often" the case.

Airlines are all about price discrimination. Leisure travellers benefit inordinately from this behavior.

> Leisure travellers benefit inordinately from this behavior.

Is that necessarily true? Charging business travelers more means those businesses have to get the money from somewhere, and one way to do that is to pass the cost onto their customers. So even if you don't fly, you're now paying $0.001 on your next box of cereal to subsidize leisure travelers. Or maybe not! I don't have any data.

It is approximately always the case for international flights.

I challenge you to find a roundtrip ticket from anywhere to anywhere that is cheaper than the one way.

Here you go: https://twitter.com/bfontn/status/1456536089963995148

I posted this down thread: E.g. LAX-NRT on 3/2 on UA 32 is $966 right now. Add a return flight on 3/9 and the flight _drops_ to $893.

Airlines really hate accounting for one way passenger flow.

This is actually an interesting problem in the crypto space as well with things like remittances.

Happens all the time on Air Canada and Air France between Toronto and Paris.

Round-trip: $800

One-way: $2000 (or $4k for two one-ways to make up a round-trip)

I don’t know why anyone would ever book a one-way. It’s insanity.

It’s a real pain, and makes it harder to create your own open-jaw when the airline doesn’t serve all 3 cities.

What ends up happening is I book through other airlines entirely that don’t pull these shenanigans.

As part of her bachelor degree my SO spent 3 months in one of the west-African countries. On the way back, they wanted to meet up in South-Africa with some other students who had gone to a different country for a vacation before returning home.

Since she hates stuff like this, I was tasked with finding a cheap tickets. For the first trip from here in Norway to the west-African country, I found that the cheapest tickets were from KLM (who flew direct from Amsterdam, so only one stop), and the round-trip ticket was indeed about $300 cheaper than a one-way ticket.

This is true for domestic flights, but international round trip tends to be cheaper

Pro Pro tip: Don't buy anything, America as a landmass can be crossed from the Southern tip to Alaska with a simple car (however a LandCruiser or a Jeep would be better to face the offroad and/or the snow)

How do you get through the Darién Gap? Just hack your own road?

are you suggesting it would be better to be on the lamb in remote parts right under the noses of the gov't attempting to be avoided? how well did that work out for Ted Kaczynski or Eric Rudolf and these were guys that loved the idea of living in the wilderness. how well do you think little ms pampered would make in a cabin in the woods?

She only had to make the uncomfortable car trip once. From San Francisco to Mexico City.

There are thousands of metropolis outside the US, hundreds in Latin America and about 20 just South of the US border in Mexico.

Persons of interest who are not Osama Bin Laden or Escobar or Chapo Guzman they are only captured because they use airports like they were regular civilians

how well did that work out for Ted Kaczynski or Eric Rudolf

Actually really well. Kaczyinski basically got turned in by his brother and Eric Rudolph hid for 5 years in the wilderness living off the land occasionally scavenging in dumpsters for leftovers (which is how he eventually got arrested by a rookie cop who thought he was a burglar). Rudolph subsequently wrote a book describing his extended hideout.

I doubt la Holmes would last long in this kind of life, but unlike those two she had access to huge amounts of money and the capability to stash someI think she could have pulled it off easily; she would be at greater risk from encountering a professional criminal that would pick up on her furtiveness.

> how well did that work out for Ted Kaczynski or Eric Rudolf and these were guys that loved the idea of living in the wilderness.

Kaczynski lived in the woods for like 2 full decades, right? I'm not sure I get the point.

Where is Kaczynski now? Whether you run to a far off country living a decent maybe modest life before ultimately getting caught vs living like it's the 1800s in not very comfy lifestyle before getting caught, you still got caught. Do you really think ms iAmSomebodySpecial is going to live like the unibomber for 20 years?

so the point is why would someone recommend that a poshSpice type of person live like a mountain man? hell, even Heisenberg couldn't live in the woods by himself before escaping back to his home to his eventual capture.

Again these people are like Osama Bin Laden, Escobar or Chapo. Every cop in the US wanted to be the person capturing them, every administrator pleaded their superiors for resources to go after them, hell people became cops dreaming of making such arrest.

Nobody dreams of chasing a girl around the globe because she convinced some Private Equity Funds and Family Offices to finance a moonshot health bet and then couldn't face the reality that the bet would never convert and so she started lying.

The OneCoin girl for example, if she never sets foot in an airport and has cut ties with family and friends, they'll never get her.

Ted was never meaningfully on the run. The place they found him was the same place with his name on it in the county assessor's office.

Kaczynski wasn't on the run and he had clear title to his property as I understand it. You could look up where he was in the property records.

He didn't get not captured because no one knew where Ted was. It's because they didn't know Ted was the guy doing the bad stuff.

pro-tip 2:

don't fly. everything is recorded

pro-tip 3: book flight before federal investigation

Especially when you’re in California and Mexico is next door. You can just drive there.

Which helps the story that it wasn’t an escape plan because they couldn’t be that stupid, could they?

pro-tip 4: be a better criminal and avoid federal investigation

Depending on the airline, you might be able to get the taxes back on the flight you didn’t take too.

You might be banned from flying that airline again if you don't get on the flight back without letting them know with a valid reason. Of course that's probably the least of your worries if you're fleeing your own country because of fraud.

People miss flights all the time. You have to get really unlucky for a one-off flight miss to result in a ban

If anything, wouldn't airlines be happy if you already paid for the flight and miss it? Especially if they overbook.

Internationally it is common for a roundtrip to be cheaper than a one-way. No, not cheaper than two one-ways. Cheaper than one one-way.

> This is a result of a strange pricing algorithm mistakes, right? Surely this doesn't maximize profit

They tend to tier things so business travelers will pay more, so there may be fare rules that increase the cost dramatically the closer you get to departure date, or charge more if you do not stay a certain number of days (I've heard one week as well as requiring a 'Saturday stayover')

Of course business travelers are the ones most likely to research and plan out how to get around these, so they might book overlapping tickets pointing opposite directions and interleave them. Airlines get upset about this, but they also know that if they try to crack down that these travelers will just take their (substantial) business elsewhere.

This is a result of a strange pricing algorithm mistakes, right? Surely this doesn't maximize profit.

> This is a result of a strange pricing algorithm mistakes, right? Surely this doesn't maximize profit.

The Saturday night stay rule is alive and well in certain markets. Business travellers like to be safely back home before the weekend, and their [employer's] pockets are deeper than leisure travellers.

The average leisure traveler typically isn’t taking a two-day international trip. Airlines see an opportunity to extract more profit from business travelers who may not know their return date. A significant example is Lufthansa (and co) — multiple thousands of dollars to book a one way to Europe, under 800 for round trip.

I wonder if they don’t intend to offer one-ways at all, but are legally required to publish the tariffed pricing that nobody actually takes.

Another example here is how much cheaper round trip tickets get when they cover a Saturday night.

I've had the situation where two round trips are cheaper than one.

Especially if you are doing like a two day trip that looks like it might be business. E.g. LHR to JFK Mon to Wednesday.

That’s called back-to-back ticketing and the airlines really don’t like it. You can easily get your frequent flier account closed for doing that, if not sued for the price difference.

The US is weird that one would even think that's an option. I'm BA gold and have never had such a problem.

Not when you're abusing a pricing quirk to drastically reduce your flight's price.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190226-the-travel-tri...

Why link to a news article about it when the actual site is just https://skiplagged.com/ ?

That site is named after the practice, not the other way around, and the article is far more informative on how it all works (as well as the steps airlines take to combat it).

You don't travel much, do you? Worst case, you loose the money spend on the ticket and you have to buy a new one. Unless, of course, you planned for a pretty long vacation anyway.

You do have to worry if you have to miss the first leg of a trip for some reason. They'll void the second leg as well if you don't call to straighten everything out.

This is because sometimes the airliner sell a flight connecting through your departure airport for less than a flight departing from it.

Let's say you want to fly from Vegas to New york, it might be cheaper to buy SFO to new york, and hop on the Vegas->Mew York leg. They essentially make this option less viable, and can price each market differently.

That makes sense. For me, what happened was I was scheduled to fly to a destination city but wound up flying there from a different departure city, earlier, due to a funeral. I was shocked to find out that they would have cancelled my return trip as well if I didn't call in to grovel.

Well if you miss the first leg, it'll be pretty difficult to use subsequent legs anyway.

I had a family trip where it was suddenly required I show up two hours earlier, and the original airline didn't have a flight that would get me there.

I booked a one way ticket on another to make it work, then was surprised when I tried to return home that I no longer had a valid ticket for the first.

Of course, they'll helpfully offer to let you buy a one-way ticket at the counter, 90 minutes before departure, at maximal pricing.

No, people used to do this a lot deliberately because of airline pricing oddities.

You'd book from your home airport --> your destination --> Tiny Airport X, then skip the second flight, because the price would often be much cheaper that way.

Called "skiplagging": https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190226-the-travel-tri...

But that's not skipping the _first_ leg.

Met a guy who had to fly Munich→Frankfurt→Munich→New York City, because it was considerably cheaper than just Munich→New York City.

He would have gladly skipped the first 2 legs of the trip.

I think that's more of an issue with 'hidden city ticketing'/deliberately missing connections, because it's cheaper than buying a ticket to the layover location.

Right. It’s an issue when you buy a ticket from A to C with an A-B and B-C leg, and you get off in B. The ticket might be cheaper (than A-B) because the airline is competing with a direct A-C flight.

But if it’s just A-B and B-A and you don’t take the return flight, no one cares. (I’ve even gotten flack for notifying the airline as a courtesy…)

For one-way markets what you have is true. For round-trip markets, typically internationally, what you have is not.

E.g. LAX-NRT on 3/2 on UA 32 is $966 right now. Add a return flight on 3/9 and the flight _drops_ to $893.

I'd be surprised any airline gave you flak for telling them you were missing a segment. They might try to charge you more (!).

> I'd be surprised any airline gave you flak for telling them you were missing a segment. They might try to charge you more (!).

They do indeed, including trip change fees. For myself, I luckily got an agent who was nice enough to ignore what I had told her.

Yeah, airlines don't like that at all. Doing it once is highly unlikely to result in any action, but you're playing with fire either way.

This is idiotic. No airline has ever permanently banned a passenger for missing a flight. The most that can happen is if you miss the first leg they will automatically cancel the second one.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/13/694352593/lufthansa-airlines-...

> The court ruled that Lufthansa's contract terms lack transparency and can't be used to recalculate airfare in a case such as this. By contrast, the court said, the airline's method of calculating its initial price is "completely intransparent."

Not sure what this has to do with what we are discussing? Even otherwise, as the article says the court dismissed the case.

It's pretty clear that LH is not going to ferry this passenger without further payment.

Back in reality, people miss flights all the time. Not only are you not banned from flying the airline, you often get a credit that you can apply for your next flight.

It does depend on what kind of ticket you're travelling on, and what restrictions apply to it.

Full disclosure: I have a bit of a history of flying on what some call "mistake fares". Back in 2013 I flew "from Europe to Hong Kong and back", except it was routed via Australia(!) both on the inbound and the outbound. Was convinced I was going to be denied boarding at every single stop on the itinerary ...

I was also younger and fitter then :)

But were you actually denied boarding, or just worried about it? The restrictions may affect what kind of credit you get for missing a flight, but you will never be banned from flying the airline - that's absurd.

Airlines don't have to honour mistake fares, and this was definitely one of those. FWIW, I got away with it.

If you miss a flight and the airline determines you booked it (typically as a return or hidden city leg) without ever intending to fly it, they will very definitely try to make life difficult for you.

Try short-checking a bag to LON on a NYC-LON-Europe booking with AA or BA, they will refuse. They're worried you booked to Europe for a lower price but intended all along to leave in LON.

There are ways round this "rule", too. If you know what you're doing.

Airplane seats are oversold, so airlines don't care.

Depends on the airline, not all overbook.

Name please. I want to fly that airline. If you say "my broter Steve's a pilot, and he's never overbooked," I'm going to be very upset

Southwest and JetBlue don't overbook.

https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...

https://www.jetblue.com/legal/notices-to-customers

However, this isn't a guarantee you won't get bumped. This just means that the maximum number of tickets sold to customers equals the number of seats on the plane. If the plane changes, so do the number of available seats. And not all passengers are customers. Some may be crew deadheading to another location.

More generally, it is less common for low cost carriers to overbook flights because their passengers tend to be cost-conscious vacationers who paid for the flight out of their own pocket and aren't about to forfeit the fare. Usually these passengers show up at a very high rate. So there usually isn't even a reason to want to overbook these flights.

sure, but once you're in mexico it's just a quick courtesy call to the airline to let them know you're an international fugitive from justice and won't be able to catch your return flight.

> it's just a quick courtesy call to the airline to let them know you're an international fugitive from justice

For the return leg, you check in online, download your boarding pass, and ignore it.

You "had a flat tyre on the way to the airport", or similar. In these situations, telling the truth doesn't help.

yeah you could do that, but wouldn't it be more fun to call the airport and tell them you're fleeing from the law?

That might even be covered under the optional flight insurance

We'll never know because nobody ever has bought that and had a successful claim

Airlines aren't your parents.

Seriously? That's Orwellian.

Airlines also do it to prevent people from "gaming" the system. People buy multi leg tickets and miss parts of the flights purposely in order to get higher airline status and points, or just to get to one city cheaper. Sometimes, they take roundtrip flights on the same day back and forth to gain points and airline flyer club status.

I used to take same day round trip flights all the time. Isn’t it normal for business travel? I could leave home at 7am, fly to stinky Sydney, meet my customers, and be home again by 7pm.

Yeah I don't think anybody would ever get on your case about tight turns that were possible. The problem only occurs when you book flights with segments that directly conflict with each other. Or depart within minutes of each other despite their origins being thousands of miles apart.

I've also been in cases where I've changed my itinerary and it was cheaper to just be a no-show--and rebook a one-way on possibly a different airline.

> Airlines also do it to prevent people from "gaming" the system. People buy multi leg tickets and miss parts of the flights purposely in order to get higher airline status and points, or just to get to one city cheaper. Sometimes, they take roundtrip flights on the same day back and forth to gain points and airline flyer club status.

Late last year I flew aaa-bbb-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd across Europe, all in one day, for exactly that reason. Five flights across four separate bookings/tickets. The connection at ccc was the tricky bit, not only "connecting" on a different ticket (so not really a connection), but a different airline alliance.

They design the system, you follow the rules. Unintended consequences aren't really your problem.

But they do pay for the return journey they didn't make, right? So where's the gain?

Internationally it is common for a roundtrip to be cheaper than a one-way. No, not cheaper than two one-ways. Cheaper than one one-way.

Ah that explains everything. When you introduce counter-economical mechanisms then you need Orwellian actions to keep them in place.

Seems like a self-inflicted problem.

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