The owner of Skiplagged did an AMA on reddit a month ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2o831k/i_run_skiplagge...
Interesting. Isn't it usually considered a bad idea to be making lots of public statements like this during a pending lawsuit?
Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
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Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#52I'm curious what the backend of this (and sites like Hipmunk) uses.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#53After reading the article, I'm kind of confused. What is the public-safety concern with this behavior?
none, it's all BS. the only real point they have is that if many people buy A-B-C tickets, their calculations will expect many physical people to be on the B-C flight. Here is a contrived situation that they might present: Aircraft are fueled to certain amounts based on the number of passengers they have. If an airplane takes off from SEA to LAX, it does not want to stop right away and land, minutes after taking off.…
AFAIK most airlines don't charge passengers by weight, so there are probably significant variances between flights anyway.
Ideally the planes would be weighed after being loaded to calculate how much fuel they should need, but that might take too long.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#54Can someone explain the harm this causes the airlines? I get there's a bit of an opportunity cost because they'll have an empty seat, but apart from that? I feel there's something more here
The airport will have to pay airport tax at the airport the passenger leaves, which could be more than at the destination proper.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#55Can someone explain the harm this causes the airlines? I get there's a bit of an opportunity cost because they'll have an empty seat, but apart from that? I feel there's something more here
The only thing I can think of is on subsidized flights to places like las vegas. If your destination isn't actually vegas but the supposed end point is, I can see it possibly getting hairy. A bit of a stretch though.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#56Can someone explain the harm this causes the airlines? I get there's a bit of an opportunity cost because they'll have an empty seat, but apart from that? I feel there's something more here
I suspect the airlines use an algorithm to maximize the prices the tickets sell for. This will have absolutely nothing to do with how much it actually costs the airline to provide the service. It will instead be based on some crazy mix of supply, demand, competitors prices, time until flight (to allow better prediction) etc.
Some routes will lose money, some will be cash-cows. The algorithm balances it all out for a net profit.
Enter an anti-algorithm that starts mucking with all of the carefully balanced numbers to do an optimization of its own and you end up with very unhappy airlines.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you sign any agreement that prohibits only eating one half of a sandwich? Would any such agreement be reasonable if buried in a dense online ordering click-wrap?
Reasonable . . . hrm. Hard to say. The surface area of duties and rights associated with an airline ticket in particular and airline travel in general are so vast that some level of clickwrap is unavoidable, not to mention the various laws that cover the industry. Comparatively, the duties and rights regarding a physical good like a sandwich are fairly simple -- it behaves like most simple physical goods. You buy it,…
I buy a sandwich; I can eat all of it or some of it.
I buy airplane seats; I can sit in both seats or just one. If they don't like which seats I chose to sit in or not, they shouldn't have sold the ticket to me in the first place.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#58to put this in laymans terms: imagine you want to go from city A to city B normally you would search for tickets from A-B however, during your search, you would NOT see tickets that go from A-B-C. why is that relevant? sometimes tickets from A-B-C are cheaper than A-B. so you would buy a ticket (A-B-C) and simply leave the airport of city B (not boarding the B-C flight). the website in question made it easier to find…
>it would be limited to your individual contractual obligations as the owner of an airline ticke
Interfering with a contractual relationship is a tort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#59The owner of Skiplagged did an AMA on reddit a month ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2o831k/i_run_skiplagge...
Interesting. Isn't it usually considered a bad idea to be making lots of public statements like this during a pending lawsuit?
Lawyers usually don't give you advance warning that they are going to sue you.
Re: Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
#60What's the appeal of this site? I just did a flight search from SFO to LGB, and fares seem to be generally higher than anything I've found on Google Flights (which is insanely good). I did a search from SFO to Munich, and it can't even find flights.
It only finds lower fares on some routes, not all of them.