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Image courtesy of Fotalia

Hidden Airline Savings Trigger Lawsuit
| published January 21, 2015 |

By Earl Perkins
Thursday Review features editor

It's a pretty sad commentary on life when two of the highest profile corporations on the planet see fit to sue a young computer whiz from New York City who's attempting to help airline travelers save money.

United Airlines and Orbitz, its travel partner, recently filed a civil lawsuit against Aktarer Zaman, who last year founded the website Skiplagged.com, which had allegedly caused financial damage to their companies. The 22-year-old student, engineer and innovator counters that the website was created merely to help travelers find inexpensive flights using a strategy called "hidden city" ticketing, according to CNN and The Daily Dot.

Airlines have long used opportunistic and predatory pricing, along with churning generations of employees and bankrupting corporations to avoid paying benefits and retirement. They have company attorneys who write golden parachutes for the executives who sometimes cripple unions and decimate pension funds; it’s not that difficult a task if you don't care about people. Stacking passengers like cordwood, crippling businesses, and extorting exorbitant fees to not separate families has become a way of life for airlines worldwide.

But what has them beyond upset is a ploy whereby you purchase an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination. Let's say you wished to fly from New York to San Francisco, but you actually book a one-way flight from New York to Lake Tahoe, with a layover in San Francisco. You don't check any baggage and just step off the plane in the City by the Bay, simply skipping the final leg of your purchased trip.

These tickets are not always the cheapest flights, but they can sometimes be less expensive than other options, thanks to the complex, fluid and inconsistent pricing model used by the major airlines. The gimmick doesn’t always work, but when it does, a traveler can save a pile of money. Zaman, it seems, has written an algorithm which exploits this process better than anything ever used. United and Orbitz call Skiplagged "unfair competition" and allege it promotes "strictly prohibited" travel, and are seeking $75,000 in "lost revenue" from Zaman.

He suspected a lawsuit was inevitable, but points out that there's nothing illegal about his website. Zaman says he's made no money from the site, merely helping travelers seek out the best prices by exposing an "inefficiency" in airline pricing that's existed for decades. Tech Crunch calls the airline industry’s weird pricing arrangement “opaque,” an unnecessarily byzantine process in which for decades few passengers ever pay the same price anyway. Zaman has merely exploited this longstanding set of vulnerabilities better than any other service or application, and that’s what has the big airlines riled. Industry rules exist to discourage it, but it is not strictly illegal.

“Hidden city” ticketing is no secret among frequent fliers, said Michael Boyd, President of Boyd Group International, an aviation consulting firm in Evergreen, Colorado. Boyd worked as an American Airline ticket agent 30 years ago, and helping customers find hidden city fares was one of his basic duties.

“I don’t think it’s illegal what he’s doing,” Boyd said. However, lawsuits are extremely expensive and the pair of multibillion-dollar corporations know the young entrepreneur can ill afford to defend himself. Inexpensive fares to destinations that aren't regional hubs are often available, according to Boyd. Many flights are routed through more popular destinations, and airline revenues would be hurt if numerous fliers were to actually take advantage of the discrepancy.

Zaman was born in Bangladesh but grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., graduating with a bachelor's degree in computer science at 20 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He presently resides in Manhattan and works at a technology start-up, with Skiplagged being just a "side project."

Zaman and United have declined to discuss the matter publically, while Orbitz—a major travel website and ticketing service—said in a statement that it's obligated to uphold airline fare rules. Travel experts say shutting down Zaman's site may be ineffective, because information has become readily available almost instantly worldwide. Many travelers can find the same savings offered by Skiplagged anyway, but it may take persistence and patience using; Zaman’s system merely makes it faster.

“If [Skiplagged is] shut down, undoubtedly there will be other people to come along to scrape fares and make them available,” said Robert Mann, president of R.W. Mann & Company, an airline consulting firm in Port Washington, New York. In the meantime, pending the outcome of the lawsuit, the Skiplagged website still operates and still has thousands of users ever day—mostly travelers simply looking to find the best price on their next airline flight.