Civil Aviation
American Airlines sues website that helped flyers to save money using trick
American Airlines is suing a website that provides tickets for less expensive indirect flights, which save passengers money by preventing them from leaving the airport for layovers.
The airline industry behemoth filed a lawsuit against Skiplagged Inc. in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, accusing the website of fraud and threatening to cancel each ticket it had sold. By booking an indirect flight whose stopover is actually their destination, travelers engage in a practice known as skip-plagging and hidden-city ticketing.
Skiplagging is generally not against the law, but airlines assert that it is against their rules. When a 17-year-old attempted to use the trick to fly from Gainesville, Florida, to Charlotte, North Carolina, with a ticket that named New York City as his destination, American kicked him off the trip and barred him for three years last month. That was less expensive for the teen than flying directly to Charlotte.
In the lawsuit, American claimed Skiplagged misled customers into thinking they could use “some kind of secret “loophole.” American warned its consumers not to alert the airline about the arrangement, claiming that the website pretends to be a regular consumer in order to sell tickets.
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American claimed that Skiplagged has never been authorised to resell airline tickets. The airline claimed in the lawsuit that Skiplagged’s actions were stringent and deceptive. “Skiplagged misleads the public into thinking that, although lacking the legal right to create and issue a contract on behalf of Americans, it can still somehow issue a fully legitimate ticket. It can’t. Each “ticket” that Skiplagged issues might end up being invalid.
