In any airport I frequent, this would not be worth the money. Some garages offer free parking for 30 minutes for pick-ups, but by the time you park, go through security, eat, and return you would owe at least $4. Then there's the time/gas cost of getting to/from the airport. Even if you used public transport it could be expensive, it's like $16 round-trip on BART from SFO to downtown San Francisco.
Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
11–20 of 119 posts
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> full refunds are unusual, normally there's a penalty fee. At least on United (not too familiar with other airlines' policies), full-fare tickets (Y, J, F) are refundable without a fee. If it was paid on a credit card, they'll typically just reverse the charge.
Probably refundable within 24/48h of the purchase. Many companies do that. Normal penalties apply from then on. So unless you buy your ticket in the last moment, no, it wouldn't work.
Refundable within X hours usually doesn't apply if you book within Y hours of the flight. The US DOT rule is refundable within 24 hours if booked at least 7 days in advance.
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> full refunds are unusual, normally there's a penalty fee. At least on United (not too familiar with other airlines' policies), full-fare tickets (Y, J, F) are refundable without a fee. If it was paid on a credit card, they'll typically just reverse the charge.
Probably refundable within 24/48h of the purchase. Many companies do that. Normal penalties apply from then on. So unless you buy your ticket in the last moment, no, it wouldn't work.
No, fully refundable fares are fully refundable at any time up to the flight. That's the whole point of a "fully-refundable" fare; it has no penalties for refunds. This is made pretty clear in the fare rules, and is the basic reason to buy full-fare tickets rather than discount fares (apart from the mileage bonus, I guess).
The 24 hour limit is for refunds on non-refundable fares. Most airlines will still let you cancel any ticket within the first 24 hours, even a discount fare (in the US, the DOT requires this for tickets booked at least 7 days in advance).
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#14The idea of having to go through security everyday for free meals sounds unpalatable.
Why? You don't need to carry anything and the guards probably know you pretty well by the 100th visit or so.
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#15You could buy a first class ticket and hold on to it for a year, then use the lounges whenever you actually do travel.
It doesn't look like this is possible in the US though. I don't see an airline that offers their lounge just for having a first class ticket. Alaska even requires a ticket for the day you're there.
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#16Can people please stop using "hacking" about every little tweak, tip, or technique to gain something?
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#17The idea of having to go through security everyday for free meals sounds unpalatable.
Some airports have land-side lounges, which would cut down on the hassle.
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#18The idea of having to go through security everyday for free meals sounds unpalatable.
Why? You don't need to carry anything and the guards probably know you pretty well by the 100th visit or so.
By the 100th visit they'd get suspicious that you're scoping out the joint for a terrorist act.
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? You don't need to carry anything and the guards probably know you pretty well by the 100th visit or so.
By the 100th visit they'd get suspicious that you're scoping out the joint for a terrorist act.
Not if you tell them you're just going to eat. Seems like that's pretty easy to confirm. Why be sneaky about it? Obviously nobody at the airline lounge cared that this guy showed up every day, why would the guards care?
Re: Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
#20I work in a pretty big GDS/IT company and that wouldn't happen in our systems. Virtually no airline asks for such a retarded business rule, flexible classes allow generally 1 to 5 changes in departure date/time(no questions asked), after that it requires manual intervention on a case by case basis.
I'm thinking he never changed the actual flight info, he just manually "photoshopped" the data on the ticket. Even with the barcodes, many airports and lounges do not actually check the barcodes, they just visually verify the info.
There was a story a few years back when Delta and some others started doing boarding by zones. People were doing online checking, saving their printable ticket as a PDF or whatever, and editing that file to change the "Zone 4" text/image to "Zone 1", and then getting early boarding.
If you travel with any regularity you soon realize that all these special checks and verifications are pretty weak. Even when you are in a place that DOES use the barcode reader to pull the data, it wouldn't be that hard to hack the barcode. The reader devices appear to be non-networked, so they are just scanning a code and displaying text. I haven't personally tried it, but that kind of "encryption", if there is any, is pretty easy to reverse engineer. You can have multiple data samples (tickets), and you know at least some of the key info contained within (passenger name, flight info, etc.) and you can experiment endlessly until you figure it out.