The airline sued the owner of the site offering tickets at an unexpected discount

Do you know that airlines, playing with ticket prices, underestimate the cost of tickets to less popular destinations and overestimate the cost of more popular ones? It looks logical. But sometimes it turns out that flying from point A to point C with a transfer to B is cheaper than just flying from A to B! This is already strange, but it happens. It turns out that you can save by buying a ticket with a transfer, and getting off the flight at a transfer point.

The service for selecting exactly such “discounts” is offered by the Skiplagged service . For example, it’s more profitable to fly from Chicago to Parisby buying a ticket to Dubai with a transfer in Paris and then just getting off in Paris. Profitable? Still would. For passengers. But as it turned out, not for airlines. In this connection, United Airlines Inc. and Orbitz ticketing website filed a joint lawsuit against the service. The companies claim that Actater Zaman “intentionally and maliciously” intervened in the airline industry by “propaganda of prohibited travel methods”. No more, no less.

InsideFlyer magazine publisher Randy Petersen tells Bloombergthat hundreds of thousands of experienced travelers annually use similar tricks to save their money. Airlines, in turn, try to track such attempts and stop them, depriving passengers of bonuses in the form of free miles or discount accounts, on the basis that such passengers enjoy an unfair advantage and, in fact, rob the carriers. “Doing so unethical,” they say, “is like replacing price tags in supermarkets.” Passengers, of course, argue with companies: "if you paid for a whole bag of chips, you don’t have to eat them all."

Skiplagged, meanwhile, encourages users to donate.to fight against a lawsuit in court. An interesting feature of the situation is that the site owner did not have profit from it and did not place advertising there, but simply provided the service for free to everyone.