I've encountered this term a lot recently. Some people do it it save money on a flight, but for reasons I can't quite understand the airlines hate it. Part of the reason it doesn't sit right with me is because it seems to violate a principle of mathematics:
Skiplagging, also known as "hidden city" ticketing , involves booking a one-stop flight with the intention of "skipping" the second leg and getting off in the layover city. Simply, it's booking a flight from Airport A to Airport C and getting off at a layover at Airport B.
People can save hundreds of dollars doing this because a nonstop flight is more expensive than booking one with a layover in the intended-destination city.
However, airlines have been trying to cut down on this travel hack and haven't shied away from punishing passengers who get caught , including canceling the return flights of those who skiplagged on their outbound journeys.
And it's only possible because airfares don't follow one of the most intuitive rules in math.
One of the most basic laws of geometry is called the "triangle inequality." If you're trying to measure the distance between points , one of the basic rules is that the distance between two points has to be less than or equal to the distance from your first point to some other point and then back to your original second point.
The inequality gets its name from how triangles work in classic plane geometry. If you have a triangle, the sum of the length of any two sides of that triangle is bigger than the length of the third side.
We might expect airline fares to more or less follow this rule and act as a distance metric between cities. Between fuel, maintenance, and crew pay, it should cost more to fly a plane from New York to Amsterdam, followed by a leg from Amsterdam to London, than it would to fly the plane from New York to Amsterdam. That cost difference should be reflected in the price of tickets between the three cities.
But that's clearly not always the case, and that violation of the triangle inequality is what makes skiplagging possible.
Why do airlines do this?
The math and science writer Brian Hayes came up with a possible explanation for this triangle-inequality-violating phenomenon in a 2013 blog post. He wrote that the discrepancy could come from the direct flight being in much higher demand than the layover flight, which he said could lead airlines to charge more for the nonstop. And the price of New York to Amsterdam to London is competing with the price of New York to London direct, not New York to Amsterdam.
That still doesn't explain it sufficiently in my eyes.
For the most part I don't travel without a checked bag, so skiplagging isn't something that would work for me anyway and thus I won't be doing it. However, I'd really like to have someone truly in the know, someone who prices flights for me, explain why it's a problem worth penalizing.
6 comments:
I've never understood how you get home. Round trip tickets are cheaper than two one-way tickets. It seems like if you skipped out on the second leg, the airline wouldn't let you board after skipping the first leg of the return flight.
I experienced that phenomenon the first time I flew from the US to Portugal. I wanted to go to Porto but the flight to Lisbon was hundreds of dollars less. This was back in the days before internet purchasing of tickets - had to call the airline of use a travel agent.
Imagine my surprise when my flight landed first in Porto (2 hours from my final destination). I had to sit on the airplane, fly to Lisbon where my in-laws met my wife and I for the 6 hour drive home where we drove within sight of the Porto airport! Ugh.
We called the airline during our stay and asked if we could hop on the plane in Porto on the way back and not drive to Lisbon. They granted us that boon and saved eight hours of driving on my in-laws part. Luckily the airline did not ask for additional money.
On the return, I asked some airline folks what was up with that and here is the synopsized response: Lots of people want to go to Lisbon and we have to compete with all the other airlines for your business. Fewer people want to go to Porto and therefore, there are fewer flights. We figure that if you really want to go to Porto, we can charge you more because you have few options. Yes, we land in Porto first because that costs us less (flight originated in Amsterdam) but we'll charge you more for your convenience of getting off.
I don't like that answer. It sounds like a "screw you" to me, along the lines of Ticketmaster's "convenience fee".
Most skip lagging that I've heard of is those who get off at the hub airport that their flight goes through on the way to a spoke. I've heard that airlines are charged more for passengers that stop and start at those hub airports than at the spoke, and that difference can outweigh the additional costs of fuel and salaries.
Darren, what don't you like about the free market? Why shouldn't the airline be allowed to charge what the market will support? That is very unlike you.
You might think it a screw you, but to the airline is in the business to make money, not charge you fares based on distance flown alone.
This isn't a free market discussion. Nowhere did I suggest that the government forbid what they're doing, just that I don't like what they're doing and that their actions seem petty.
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