Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

NoZebra120vClip

Come on, this is low-grade fraud, and even if airlines did not "lose money" it would still have the potential for headaches and confusion in a cascade effect.

When I book an airline ticket, I'm making a contract that says "I'm paying you to transport my person and belongings from Point A to Point B to Point C with these details." Now unless I cancel or modify that reservation, the airline is expecting me to follow through, because I'm monetarily invested.

What are the consequences of missing my flight? My name will be on the manifest and the airline will wonder what happened to me. They probably won't file a missing persons report, but their records will note that I had a flight but I wasn't on it.

So what if I've done some "hidden city ticketing" and the aircraft on the last leg crashes? My friends and family, and first responders, might wonder where I am at that point. Was I on the flight? Did I miss it? Why would I miss the last leg of a multipoint flight?

What if I am "hidden city ticketing" to another country? Isn't that going to get sticky with immigration? I mean, I fly to Spain and then Istanbul, and my airline continues on to Kazakhstan, but I'm hanging out at the Hagia Sophia. What are the Kazakhstani authorities gonna say about my visa plans or however I faked out everybody and made them believe I was going there? Isn't Turkey going to have something to say about my continued presence when I never should've left the airport?

Logistically, it must really mess up the airlines' planning and operations. If people get in the habit of reserving seats they don't intend to fart in, then that's a capacity problem. Passengers gonna get bumped. Imagine a whole 737 full of "hidden city ticketer" seats that doesn't even bother departing.

Yeah, I get it, passengers save money. Solve the fare imbalance somehow, airlines! Obviously if hackers are hacking you then you need a mitigation, and it's bad optics for you to detain and interrogate a script kiddie, such that he makes a headline on the Daily Fail. COVID-19 hurt us all; suck it up.

It's not fraud. I get what you're saying with the operational concern trying to locate an unaccompanied minor who was supposed to be at the gate and is now 'missing'. But he paid the price the airline posted for the ticket. Who got defrauded?

The passenger asserts at booking that "I will be at the boarding gate before the plane leaves because I intend to occupy seat X on your aircraft" but that's a lie, because they have no such intention to board the aircraft. That's the fraud, and that's why it's low-grade, because people miss flights accidentally for numerous reasons, this is just a deliberate missing of a flight, and taking away resources from someone else who should have them. Although overbooking, bumping, and standby are all policies in place to deal with the inevitable missed flights, whatever their reason.

It might be wasteful, but wasting resources to save money isn’t fraud.

Booking a flight and then not getting on it isn’t fraud. By this logic buying a sandwich and then not eating it should be fraud because you implied that you intended to eat it then didn’t

If I buy the last sandwich, then I've deprived someone else of that sandwich by purchasing it. In case you haven't noticed, seats on an aircraft are a limited resource. You make a "reservation" to declare that you intend to occupy that seat, and the corollary is that nobody else will be able to occupy it. If enough fraudsters reserve seats without using them, the airline has another problem. Say they loaded the galley with 100 peanut packets because 100 passengers promised to board, but now there's only 20 on the flight, what are we gonna do with all these peanuts?

As I mentioned, airlines have plenty of policies to deal with reserved but unused seats, but you've still intentionally taken away a finite resource because you wanted to save a couple bucks.

> As I mentioned, airlines have plenty of policies to deal with reserved but unused seats

the ticket on the second leg had been paid for

> but you've still intentionally taken away a finite resource because you wanted to save a couple bucks.

it's really going to blow your mind when you realise airlines do the reverse all the time

they call it "overbooking"

knowingly selling the same seat twice? sounds like "low level fraud" by your definition

> If I buy the last sandwich, then I've deprived someone else of that sandwich by purchasing it.

It’s not considered fraud though

It's not fraud but how many people are going to laud the virtue of purchasing a sandwich to throw it away?

It’s not good but I feel like it should be blamed on the airline’s pricing structure

The key difference is that the sandwich didn't come with a terms of carriage, and a ticket does.

You should see how much fraud I commit with my gym membership.

So many people have unused gym memberships that the gym can afford to purchase 3 new treadmills every year. Seems like a fair tradeoff.

But you've strawmanned this. Do you go to the gym, put your towel down on the leg press machine, and then go to the juice bar for a drink? Because that's what we're discussing here: taking away a finite resource so that others can't use it.

People with unused gym memberships who don't show up haven't promised anything. They didn't make an appointment with a personal trainer, they don't have machines reserved, there's no implicit contract to exchange limited resources for a membership fee. Your membership fee gives you access to these resources, not a guarantee of their usage. If you go to the gym and every treadmill is in use, then you don't get a treadmill for now. You just wait for a treadmill.

evidently the airline priced that resource at a negative value. (Florida to Charlotte $X, Florida to Charlotte to NY $X-$Y.) so apparently that resource was worse than useless.

It's only negative if you think airline's pricing model is something simple like "distance traveled * cost per mile", which isn't the model that airlines with advanced revenue management systems use.

From a black box perspective it's easy to conclude that it's negative.

The airline asserts at booking that they will "grant me exclusive access to seat X on a specific flight from A to B" but that's a lie, because they have no intention to honour the contract if they are overbooked (or if they don't sell enough tickets and the flight is cancelled).

When the consumer does something to save money you call it "fraud". When the airline does it, it's okay because "policies"? Putting aside the asinine "contract" for a second, how is one morally correct, while the other isn't?

> The airline asserts at booking that they will "grant me exclusive access to seat X on a specific flight from A to B" but that's a lie, because they have no intention to honour the contract if they are overbooked (or if they don't sell enough tickets and the flight is cancelled).

This is a moot point because they never promised exclusive access in the first place.

>Putting aside the asinine "contract" for a second, how is one morally correct, while the other isn't?

This just moves the goalposts to an area where anything goes. You could argue that skiplagging is morally correct, because your morals are "corporations are scum, consumers are always in the right", or take a hardcore deontological view that any sort of lying/misrepresentation is morally wrong.

>This is a moot point because they never promised exclusive access in the first place.

That's the implied deal when they sell you the ticket. It's the public perception. Only in the fine print does it says otherwise. Hence, that's why people are so outraged when it happens to them.

I'd also argue that the corporation's contract with the consumer is not fair because there is a gross imbalance of power. Airlines (as a group) can put almost anything they want and the consumer has no recourse (except meek consumer protection laws).

Anyways, I just found it interesting that you jumped at the opportunity to vociferously call what the consumer did "fraud" but what the airlines do (ie double booking) as normal business.

While it's correct in a legal sense, I don't think that's a very interesting discussion. The contract is the contract, sure. But the big picture deserves examination also.

>This just moves the goalposts to an area where anything goes.

No, we were discussing a very specific situation. Don't do that.

This isn’t how any of this works. Manifests are built at boarding, visas work at entry. You are inventing problems to take the side of a corporation.

https://youtu.be/Aq_1l316ow8

Honestly, I didn’t read their comment as taking any sides; it’s really just descriptive of their perspective. There are good arguments for why this is fraud in a particular way and another commenter in this thread pointed out (correctly, in my opinion) that “overbooking” is a similar kind of fraud on the airlines’ part.

Point being, many happenings are more nuanced than Alice wronged Bob and Bob did nothing wrong to Alice. I suspect if you read the parent comment again you may indeed find some of their points to be agreeable.

> Solve the fare imbalance somehow, airlines!

This is a pretty agreeable take except the seeming implication that any “skiplaggers” are doing something wrong. They really just (currently) play the airlines’ game better and the airlines are being over-sensitive about it.

The proper solution for this would be for the airlines to fix their pricing issues rather than to intimidate random passengers into paying the “correct” amount and pretend it was the individual passenger’s fault when they committed this supposed fraud.

Are you an airline AI? What a crock.

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