This is anecdotal, but I had an experience where I was flying from LaGuardia to Madison, WI with a layover in Chicago. The last leg of the flight from Chicago to Madison was delayed by several hours, to the point where it would be significantly faster for my boyfriend to drive down from Madison, pick me up at the airport in Chicago, and drive me back. I don't recall which airline I was using at the time, but the gate agent told me that it was their policy to refuse to pull someone's checked luggage if someone didn't "want" to complete the last leg of the journey, but if I told someone that I was not feeling well and wished to end the trip early due to health reasons, that would be the easiest way to do it. So that's what I did - I went up to a different gate of the same airline, told them I was sick and would not be getting on the connecting flight, and the luggage was downstairs in a special area of the baggage claim within 20 minutes. It felt like being in grade school and telling the nurse I was sick to get a day off...
Airline pricing drives me insane and is what happens when you take price discrimination/revenue optimization to the (often idiotic) extreme.
It's very much possible for a one way flight to cost more than a round trip flight that includes the one way flight. For instance, a one way ticket on Delta flight #92 going from JFK to TXL at 8:39pm on May 15, 2019 costs $2,902 [0]. But if you add on a return flight (which includes the original DL 92 flight), the price drops to $957 [1].
I hope that Lufthansa loses big for this. Extorting a person to complete the journey is just wrong.
This doesn't surprise me one bit from my experience with Lufthansa. They love to blame the customer for everything, especially when they (LH) screw up.
EDIT: This is a great example of where a corporation should suffer criminal charges. But given Germany's protection of their flag carrier.. it won't happen.
Anecdotal, but I was flying out of a German airport last week. Luggage, peculiarly, was checked at the gate, there was no separate area for checking hold luggage.
The gate was announced about an hour before the gate closure, and by the time we'd got to the gate (~5 minutes) we were informed that the bag drop was closed. We had a brief argument, and they reluctantly took the bags. Insane.
I’ve heard of airlines canceling the return flight if you skip a segment in the outbound leg. And that makes sense if their terms lay that out ahead of time.
I’ve also heard of airlines canceling “overlapping” tickets which would not be possible unless you skipped a leg. I’ve been hit by that when trying to book multiple flights for a business trip where I didn’t know exactly when I would be coming back, and the advance fare ticket was a small fraction of the cost of a refundable ticket.
Complaining that a customer skips a final segment on the return flight is poor sport. Except for one thing — if they have you in the system because you started your return flight earlier in the day, and now at your connecting flight they are calling final boarding again and again waiting for a passenger that never shows, it holds up the entire plane and is a drag on their resources trying to page you and track you down.
I can understand airlines refusing future service to someone who does this to them repeatedly. A 5 year ban or terminating their frequent flier account or something along that lines would seem appropriate.
The ban might be hard to enforce however since it’s not like Amazon where they can blacklist your address.
Really there is an easy solution to this - don't have such batshit pricing structures that longer trips taken partway leaving empty seats is cheaper!
If it is cheaper for them to head to a third city first instead of directly just have the prices reflect it so it is x to layover and y to destination which is less than z a direct flight - if it is even offered.
is it possible that airlines have arrivals quotas or limits in certain airports, or pay per passenger which arrives at an airport? this could cause what looks like "batshit" pricing.
I missed an outbound leg of a return flight from Sydney to London 15 years ago. When I got to Heathrow to get my flight back, they told me the ticket was void because I hadn't taken the outbound leg, then charged me 3k GBP for a 'standard ticket'.
I spent about 4 months arguing with BA about it and eventually got most of the ticket refunded.
After reading the German court document linked in the CNN article (not a lawyer), it appears charging customers extra for not taking a leg of their flight is actually legal in the eyes of the court. They also cite a decision of the highest ordinary court in Germany (BGH) to that effect. I find that quite worrying.
The lawsuit was only struck down because of a lack of transparency in the pricing, as the customer has no way to check the fare they will end up with if they skip a leg. So if they publish prices for skipped legs, it would be a-ok I guess.
Legality and ethical correctness are not always the same thing. Just because the court doesn't see any conflict with current law doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. In that case, there should be a change of law.
> A Berlin district court dismissed the lawsuit in December, but Lufthansa's spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the company has "already filed the appeal against the decision."
So basically this lawsuit has already been dismissed by a lower court, and but Lufthansa is appealing. The entire dynamics here seem like Lufthansa is unlikely to win and even if it does the amount it is claiming ($3K?) is way lower than legal costs, but the publicity of the lawsuit is the entire point they're making. A version of SLAPP, if you will.
Basically because ticket prices have no relation to the airline's cost, only to supply and demand. So when a multi-leg journey happens to serve an underserved route along the way, airlines want to be able to charge that leg according to its own supply and demand, even though it's a component of a route that has higher supply.
IMO it should be illegal. A company can't stop you from buying a car for its parts. They shouldn't be able to do this.
Say SFO to DEN has the big four carriers, each coming in suspiciously close to the exact same price ($199 one week out).
Then Frontier decides to run that route, charging ~$99 one week out.
Three or four of the big carriers will magically drop their fares to match Frontier's.
Frontier, the most mercurial of airlines, will then drop their SFO-DEN route because it's no longer profitable (or shut down completely as they've done a couple times). The big four go back to their old fares or higher.
Now if I wanted to go SFO-SLC to see the Jazz play, that might be $299 one way. If I book the SFO-DEN on Delta, whose hub is in SLC, I get the benefit of the Denver fare. Most people would not think to do that (because they check bags and don't have time as cheap as I do).
Alternatively, one of the cheapest destinations is often Cleveland (go figure). Maybe SFO-CLE is $99 for the few people (and Skiplagged) who go looking for it. That might get you the ability to go to a dozen US cities for $99, all of which are way more expensive when booked directly.
> I know that airline pricing can be quite odd, but charging less for two flights than for one just seems to defy logic. What am I missing?
This is quite common: in this case, Seattle to Frankfurt has a limited number of direct flights (Lufthansa and Condor only), and people are willing to pay a premium for direct flights; Seattle to Oslo has no direct flights, so Lufthansa is in competition with every other airline that has a hub along a reasonable route (at the very least: KLM/Air France, BA, SAS, Icelandair), and as such there's more competition there.
In addition to those comments, I should add, this may be socially-efficient in some non-trivial sense of the word:
1) There is legit value in a direct flight between two cities to people who "really" want to go between them.
2) You may not be able to fill up the planes for the A-B routes and B-C routes.
3) It is legitimately lower value, and thus should cost less, to provide carriage from A to C by putting someone on A-B then B-C, (vs a direct A-C route).
4) So, for an airline to capture the full value of the flights it provides, it needs to charge a high premium to people who really want to fly A-B or B-C, and, if it can't find enough people to fill the planes, to charge a discount to someone using the seats merely for a longer A-C trip.
In this scenario, with hidden city pricing:
1) People who get the direct routes pay more.
2) People who get an indirect route pay less.
3) All seats are utilized.
That coincides with our (or at least my) intuitive notion of what efficiency looks like.
So, who are you hurting when you get off at B with your cheap ticket? You're not paying your "fair[1] share", and thus making it harder to justify running that specific direct A-B route because it's harder to capture the full economic value of the route.
Certain airlines have near monopolies on certain airports. These airports are called hubs. The airline uses these hubs as points of connection for multilegged flights. It also means that someone who actually wants to use the airline's hub airport as their final destination can be charged more due to lack of competition from other airlines.
However, I recently read about the Freedoms of the Air, which define international airline abilities to move about in various ways; and some of that includes where you can stop temporarily (fuel planes, etc) and pick up passengers.
I wonder if some of this has to do with a cost structure that comes out of that? I'm also totally willing to believe that it's not a fully rational system and is more about demand/profit for certain routes.
When you buy flights, you never buy how you get there, you buy your starting point to your final point. (That's how they're priced) The starting or final point may have discounts or taxes associated with it.
I guess this headline makes one want to grab the pitchfork, but I don’t know if we will end in a better place if carriers are barred from following the pricing strategy at the core of this.
LH is simply routing passengers like IP packages, where sometimes it may be more economical to, for example, go the long way around to get to the destination. In those cases, they want to charge you the (lower) price of your trip’s usefulness to you, irregardless of the (longer) route it took you to get there.
Barring this practice will just make those flights more expensive, or potentially reduce competition on some rote that a carrier like LH does not service with direct flights.
The narrower court case is simply a matter of contract law. Sure, there need to be exceptions for sudden sickness or actual changes of plans, but those are factual questions, not ones of law at issue here. I’m no fan of naive contract fetishism upholding the right to sign away your first-born n &Cs. But this issue here really does not strike me as overtly one-sided.
Can someone explain the economic rationale to force passengers to fly more for a cheaper ticket from the airlines perspective? I understand the breach of contract arguments but why sell tickets priced this way in the first place?
Supply & demand plus transportation logistics, cross promotion, etc. Imagine Las Vegas has an agreement with airlines to subsidize airfair in return for a certain volume of inbound humans. The airline optimizes logistics, and finds that from your city to Vegas wouldn’t result in a full flight, but splitting travelers to higher volume hubs allows them to consolidate for a full flight, maximizing thier subisidy compared to their outlay.
They don’t care that the passenger is connecting in this case, they are not what is being optized for. However, if the passenger terminates their trip at the hub, the airline may lose the subsidy making the entire trip a loss for that passenger, despite using less resources on that one particular human.
I don’t know if those are the types of arrangmenta that exist, but it would be hard for me to imagine a scenario where cities that rely heavily on tourism aren’t spending money to encourage airlines to bring more people.
The other part of that is to the customer/passenger, there is a hidden shadow transaction on their flight with a third party. In other forms of logistics, this is common (last mile delivery by USPS, for example), but I don’t think most people like to think that they are thought of as cargo.
My guess is this might be similar to how company's sue people for trademark violations, even when they are not doing any direct damage to the brand i.e. to protect themselves from future legal liability. If too many customers use the hidden city in a foreign airline flight, they might be found not be in compliance with route agreements.
Assuming they write the contract right, this is pretty standard breach of contract, regardless of the propriety of suing your customers.
(Skiplegged.com was thrown out for lack of jurisdiction, because United wasn't suing the people breaching the contract, only the people enabling it. Here, Lufthansa is suing the right people)
Hacker news never seems to like contracts that don't let it do whatever they want, but the person paid and agreed to do a thing, and didn't do it.
The fact that y'all think that thing is stupid is irrelevant.
Don't make contracts you aren't going to keep.
Normal people who aren't lawyers think of tickets as options not futures; that is, an option to board, not an obligation to board. That's how most people's experience of tickets work, starting out with cinema tickets from a young age, and working up to bus and train tickets later on.
It may be that people need to get legal advice every time they buy a ticket, but that's probably not very efficient.
The internet is decreasing the opacity of differential pricing, but premium airlines rely on differential pricing for their business model. Thus this case trying to move to harder constraints than mere obfuscation. The case will have PR value too, in changing the public's understanding of the nature of a plane ticket.
Sure, and can I sue Lufthansa when their plane is late or flight is cancelled? The airline has all the power to enforce an extremely one sided contract where they don’t have to perform. Including near monopoly control of many routes.
Would the situation be any different if the man had booked the Frankfurt-Berlin leg with a different airline?
Well, for starters, Lufthansa wouldn't have any way to know that the passenger flew to Berlin; for all it knew, he could have just missed his flight to Oslo. But if somehow this came to Lufthansa's knowledge, would they still have a valid case against him?
I have done this many times (including with Lufthansa) but I would ask them to check in the bag only until where I want to stop the trip. I don’t know if they wasted time waiting for me during those times.
[+] [-] goodells|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindong|7 years ago|reply
It's very much possible for a one way flight to cost more than a round trip flight that includes the one way flight. For instance, a one way ticket on Delta flight #92 going from JFK to TXL at 8:39pm on May 15, 2019 costs $2,902 [0]. But if you add on a return flight (which includes the original DL 92 flight), the price drops to $957 [1].
[0]: https://www.google.com/flights#flt=/m/02_286./m/0156q.2019-0...
[1]: https://www.google.com/flights#flt=/m/02_286./m/0156q.2019-0...
[+] [-] monksy|7 years ago|reply
This doesn't surprise me one bit from my experience with Lufthansa. They love to blame the customer for everything, especially when they (LH) screw up.
EDIT: This is a great example of where a corporation should suffer criminal charges. But given Germany's protection of their flag carrier.. it won't happen.
[+] [-] fredley|7 years ago|reply
The gate was announced about an hour before the gate closure, and by the time we'd got to the gate (~5 minutes) we were informed that the bag drop was closed. We had a brief argument, and they reluctantly took the bags. Insane.
[+] [-] DannyBee|7 years ago|reply
This is not a great example of anything else, despite your hyperbole.
[+] [-] zaroth|7 years ago|reply
I’ve also heard of airlines canceling “overlapping” tickets which would not be possible unless you skipped a leg. I’ve been hit by that when trying to book multiple flights for a business trip where I didn’t know exactly when I would be coming back, and the advance fare ticket was a small fraction of the cost of a refundable ticket.
Complaining that a customer skips a final segment on the return flight is poor sport. Except for one thing — if they have you in the system because you started your return flight earlier in the day, and now at your connecting flight they are calling final boarding again and again waiting for a passenger that never shows, it holds up the entire plane and is a drag on their resources trying to page you and track you down.
I can understand airlines refusing future service to someone who does this to them repeatedly. A 5 year ban or terminating their frequent flier account or something along that lines would seem appropriate.
The ban might be hard to enforce however since it’s not like Amazon where they can blacklist your address.
[+] [-] Nasrudith|7 years ago|reply
If it is cheaper for them to head to a third city first instead of directly just have the prices reflect it so it is x to layover and y to destination which is less than z a direct flight - if it is even offered.
[+] [-] everdev|7 years ago|reply
It does seem like a breakdown in their pricing logic rather than anything injurious the passenger did.
[+] [-] dgaudet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dabeeeenster|7 years ago|reply
I spent about 4 months arguing with BA about it and eventually got most of the ticket refunded.
I still think about that.
[+] [-] lutoma|7 years ago|reply
The lawsuit was only struck down because of a lack of transparency in the pricing, as the customer has no way to check the fare they will end up with if they skip a leg. So if they publish prices for skipped legs, it would be a-ok I guess.
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fanzhang|7 years ago|reply
So basically this lawsuit has already been dismissed by a lower court, and but Lufthansa is appealing. The entire dynamics here seem like Lufthansa is unlikely to win and even if it does the amount it is claiming ($3K?) is way lower than legal costs, but the publicity of the lawsuit is the entire point they're making. A version of SLAPP, if you will.
[+] [-] detaro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|7 years ago|reply
I know that airline pricing can be quite odd, but charging less for two flights than for one just seems to defy logic. What am I missing?
[+] [-] peeters|7 years ago|reply
IMO it should be illegal. A company can't stop you from buying a car for its parts. They shouldn't be able to do this.
[+] [-] mchannon|7 years ago|reply
Say SFO to DEN has the big four carriers, each coming in suspiciously close to the exact same price ($199 one week out).
Then Frontier decides to run that route, charging ~$99 one week out.
Three or four of the big carriers will magically drop their fares to match Frontier's.
Frontier, the most mercurial of airlines, will then drop their SFO-DEN route because it's no longer profitable (or shut down completely as they've done a couple times). The big four go back to their old fares or higher.
Now if I wanted to go SFO-SLC to see the Jazz play, that might be $299 one way. If I book the SFO-DEN on Delta, whose hub is in SLC, I get the benefit of the Denver fare. Most people would not think to do that (because they check bags and don't have time as cheap as I do).
Alternatively, one of the cheapest destinations is often Cleveland (go figure). Maybe SFO-CLE is $99 for the few people (and Skiplagged) who go looking for it. That might get you the ability to go to a dozen US cities for $99, all of which are way more expensive when booked directly.
[+] [-] gsnedders|7 years ago|reply
This is quite common: in this case, Seattle to Frankfurt has a limited number of direct flights (Lufthansa and Condor only), and people are willing to pay a premium for direct flights; Seattle to Oslo has no direct flights, so Lufthansa is in competition with every other airline that has a hub along a reasonable route (at the very least: KLM/Air France, BA, SAS, Icelandair), and as such there's more competition there.
[+] [-] SilasX|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153704
In addition to those comments, I should add, this may be socially-efficient in some non-trivial sense of the word:
1) There is legit value in a direct flight between two cities to people who "really" want to go between them.
2) You may not be able to fill up the planes for the A-B routes and B-C routes.
3) It is legitimately lower value, and thus should cost less, to provide carriage from A to C by putting someone on A-B then B-C, (vs a direct A-C route).
4) So, for an airline to capture the full value of the flights it provides, it needs to charge a high premium to people who really want to fly A-B or B-C, and, if it can't find enough people to fill the planes, to charge a discount to someone using the seats merely for a longer A-C trip.
In this scenario, with hidden city pricing:
1) People who get the direct routes pay more.
2) People who get an indirect route pay less.
3) All seats are utilized.
That coincides with our (or at least my) intuitive notion of what efficiency looks like.
So, who are you hurting when you get off at B with your cheap ticket? You're not paying your "fair[1] share", and thus making it harder to justify running that specific direct A-B route because it's harder to capture the full economic value of the route.
[1] yes, yes, "is a four-letter word" and all...
[+] [-] howlin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|7 years ago|reply
However, I recently read about the Freedoms of the Air, which define international airline abilities to move about in various ways; and some of that includes where you can stop temporarily (fuel planes, etc) and pick up passengers.
I wonder if some of this has to do with a cost structure that comes out of that? I'm also totally willing to believe that it's not a fully rational system and is more about demand/profit for certain routes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air
[+] [-] monksy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Operyl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaki-dora|7 years ago|reply
LH is simply routing passengers like IP packages, where sometimes it may be more economical to, for example, go the long way around to get to the destination. In those cases, they want to charge you the (lower) price of your trip’s usefulness to you, irregardless of the (longer) route it took you to get there.
Barring this practice will just make those flights more expensive, or potentially reduce competition on some rote that a carrier like LH does not service with direct flights.
The narrower court case is simply a matter of contract law. Sure, there need to be exceptions for sudden sickness or actual changes of plans, but those are factual questions, not ones of law at issue here. I’m no fan of naive contract fetishism upholding the right to sign away your first-born n &Cs. But this issue here really does not strike me as overtly one-sided.
[+] [-] martin_a|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torpfactory|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonhohle|7 years ago|reply
They don’t care that the passenger is connecting in this case, they are not what is being optized for. However, if the passenger terminates their trip at the hub, the airline may lose the subsidy making the entire trip a loss for that passenger, despite using less resources on that one particular human.
I don’t know if those are the types of arrangmenta that exist, but it would be hard for me to imagine a scenario where cities that rely heavily on tourism aren’t spending money to encourage airlines to bring more people.
The other part of that is to the customer/passenger, there is a hidden shadow transaction on their flight with a third party. In other forms of logistics, this is common (last mile delivery by USPS, for example), but I don’t think most people like to think that they are thought of as cargo.
[+] [-] html5web|7 years ago|reply
Don't use Lufthansa's services.
[+] [-] NedIsakoff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linkmotif|7 years ago|reply
Personally I don’t get the whole concept of suing your customers. I would just ban him if I was Lufthansa.
[+] [-] thomaslangston|7 years ago|reply
Some background on the subject: https://youtu.be/thqbjA2DC-E
[+] [-] addicted|7 years ago|reply
What's likely to happen is if the passenger doesn't show up, the flight will be delayed because their bags need to be unloaded.
[+] [-] sct202|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DisruptiveDave|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|7 years ago|reply
I can remember once in the past 5 years checking a bag.
[+] [-] exhilaration|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyBee|7 years ago|reply
Hacker news never seems to like contracts that don't let it do whatever they want, but the person paid and agreed to do a thing, and didn't do it.
The fact that y'all think that thing is stupid is irrelevant. Don't make contracts you aren't going to keep.
[+] [-] barrkel|7 years ago|reply
Normal people who aren't lawyers think of tickets as options not futures; that is, an option to board, not an obligation to board. That's how most people's experience of tickets work, starting out with cinema tickets from a young age, and working up to bus and train tickets later on.
It may be that people need to get legal advice every time they buy a ticket, but that's probably not very efficient.
The internet is decreasing the opacity of differential pricing, but premium airlines rely on differential pricing for their business model. Thus this case trying to move to harder constraints than mere obfuscation. The case will have PR value too, in changing the public's understanding of the nature of a plane ticket.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] admax88q|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|7 years ago|reply
https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.ht...
I couldn't find any example of such a thing in this united airlines contract.
[+] [-] gberger|7 years ago|reply
Well, for starters, Lufthansa wouldn't have any way to know that the passenger flew to Berlin; for all it knew, he could have just missed his flight to Oslo. But if somehow this came to Lufthansa's knowledge, would they still have a valid case against him?
[+] [-] vinni2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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