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Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

> 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."

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.

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

> 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?

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.

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.

Seems like a self-inflicted problem.

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

> 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.

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