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Airlines have recently been tossing toys about a controversial flight booking method known as ‘skip lagging’, or ‘hidden city ticketing’, with one even suing a website that helps customers book these kinds of trips.

Skip lagging is a cool name for when a traveller books a multi-leg flight with a connection, but instead of flying to the final destination, the passenger opts to disembark at the connecting city. Typically, connecting flights are cheaper than some flights directly to your destination, which allows flyers to rig the system a bit.

As an example, let’s say you want to go to Amsterdam for some, err shopping. Direct flights to this city might be more expensive than a flight special to Dubai, with a stop-over in Amsterdam. So you book the longer flight at a lower rate and simply disembark at Amsterdam. Stuff the Burj Khalifa, let’s go see Anne Frank’s house.

But airlines are now crying foul, and have even gone as far as banning customers who make use of this practice, and even placing them on no-fly lists.

While this practice isn’t illegal, airlines frown on booking flights this way because it takes up space that could’ve been used for someone else. American Airlines has now gone as far as suing a website called skiplag.com for promoting skip lagging.

If a customer knowingly or unknowingly purchases a ticket and doesn’t fly all of the segments in their itinerary, it can lead to operational issues with checked bags and prevent other customers from booking a seat when they may have an urgent need to travel. Intentionally creating an empty seat that could have been used by another customer or team member is an all-around bad outcome.

Airlines believe this defrauds them from the cost of booking a direct flight. In addition to this there may be issues where passengers disembark and the airline is held up looking for the ‘missing’ passenger. It also goes against the ‘carrier contract’ that you agree to when you book a flight. This says that an airline agrees to take you somewhere, and you agree to go there.

It may be a bit aspris to say this, but surely this is the passenger’s version of airlines overbooking flights. This has happened to many a traveler who rocks up at an airport, only to find that they have booked the 205th seat on a 200-seater aeroplane. Perhaps not the best analogy, but it does feel as if the issue with skip lagging has more to do with ‘inconvenience’ than any real financial damage to the airline.

Either way, airlines don’t want you to do it, so it’s perhaps best to just marvel at the ability of people to misuse almost every system anywhere, and not do it. Even if airlines often get away with shenanigans of their own. Goose and gander, eh?

For a full interview with an airline and travel industry analyst, check out the interview on CapeTalk.

[source:capetalk]