31–40 of 157 posts
Their definition of `fraud` is insane, but if they want to open the door for more recourse when things don't happen as scheduled I'm okay with that. I think United owes the majority of their customers quite a bit more than hidden city fare users owe them.
I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts. Plus they're outright wrong that it constitutes "fraud," if for no other reason than the person skipping additional legs didn't profit from it, instead they simply limited UA's ability to further profit off of their travel. If this was "fraud" then any other airline discount or saving would be too. Shop around for the cheapest pric…
This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg. If they're overbooked, they avoid having to pay to bump someone. They incur less in fuel costs, as the plane lands in its destination city with a slightly greater fuel load. Some passenger somewhere has a more pleasant flight because they have an empty seat next to them.
Not necessarily. If you use use hidden-city ticketing, they lost out on extracting the extra money they wanted to charge you for going to your intended destination AND the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else for the leg you didn't take.
That said, I think it's the airline's fault for using an over-complicated pricing model with odd behaviors that customers can take advantage of like this. There'd be no issue if they just charged the same per leg regardless of your final destination. That'd make everything transparent and totally remove the need for hidden-city ticketing.
It's not clear why exactly the airlines are so upset about this. If the passenger isn't present they can just shoehorn a standby onto the flight, or at least save on fuel costs.
Because a ticket from x->y->z sometimes costs less than a ticket from x->y. Presumably this has something to do with how much the markets in x, y, and z are able to bear. As in, people in X and Y will pay more for tickets than people in Z, so tickets terminating in Z are cheaper.
Airlines generally also avoid empty seats, because it almost always means lost revenue. They'd rather overbook and risk having to compensate bumped passengers than have no-shows. Combine these factors, and you can see why they're really unhappy about people skipping the Y-Z flights.
Of course, in most situations, consumers are not penalized for using or consuming only part of a purchased good or service, even if they deliberately discard part in order to save money. United is in the wrong here, and I doubt a court would agree with them.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more companies abuse the credit reporting system like this. Recourse is painful for the customer, and I imagine a non-trivial number of them will just pay off the debt. I'm guessing with the gutting of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau we'll see a rise in these type of practices.
There is no debt, though. You can't charge people extra for not showing up at a flight. A non-flying passenger demonstrably makes a resource available: they can sell the seat to someone else. Even if they don't, it's less weight: less fuel burned. The idea that the passenger should have paid more to get off at that intermediate airport is purely a fabricated entitlement. If they underlying hypothesis behind this enti…
No-one's disputing that. The parent post is supposing that because taking this to court and proving that United violated the law is expensive (in both money and more importantly effort), a large enough percentage of people will not do it.
It's yet another example of the mere involvement of the legal system being used as a deterrent against individuals, regardless of who's in the right.
I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts. Plus they're outright wrong that it constitutes "fraud," if for no other reason than the person skipping additional legs didn't profit from it, instead they simply limited UA's ability to further profit off of their travel. If this was "fraud" then any other airline discount or saving would be too. Shop around for the cheapest pric…
I wonder if they've snuck in a mandatory binding arbitration clause into their contract, and if that would cover disputes about false debts. Even if the false debts were totally illegal, arbitration could make it impractical to challenge them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg. If they're overbooked, they avoid having to pay to bump someone. They incur less in fuel costs, as the plane lands in its destination city with a slightly greater fuel load. Some passenger somewhere has a more pleasant flight because they have an empty seat next to them.
> This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg. Not necessarily. If you use use hidden-city ticketing, they lost out on extracting the extra money they wanted to charge you for going to your intended destination AND the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else for the leg you didn't take. That said, I think it's the airline's fault for using an ove…
One very interesting thing here is how they're using the credit score system to blackmail people. If this continues, any company can hold you hostage by threatening to ruin your score, without any recourse from you.
Nah, this isn't a legal debt that they can forward to a collection agency, as pointed out in the article. They can't legally ding your credit for this (you've paid all your actual outstanding obligations to them), and if they do, I imagine the counterclaims could be significant (reputational damage, monetary losses due to higher interest rates or ineligible loans, etc.). Now, if this were the "social credit" system o…
My understanding is that many collection agencies aren't very scrupulous about they debts they try to collect. Many of them are false, already paid, or lacking necessary documentation.
Fuck United, and any other company that wants to abuse the credit reporting system for this. How would they even prove you have a debt? I paid for a ticket, and the airline provided said ticket. Whether I choose to use the ticket or not should be entirely up to me, and choosing not to fly doesn't magically incur them extra debt that I'd be liable for. This is especially ridiculous with how exorbitant ticket change fe…