How a 23-Year-Old Beat United Airlines
1st January 2016
Aktarer Zaman, now 23, didn’t back down when United Airlines (UAL) and Orbitz sued him a little over a year ago for opening a website called Skiplagged.com to help travelers find cheap plane tickets.
Sounds to me like a useful service. Typically, when airlines discount seats it’s because people aren’t buying them, so he’s helping them fill up their planes.
United and Orbitz were livid about Skiplagged, calling the start up website “unfair competition” that promoted “strictly prohibited” travel. They filed a federal lawsuit and demanded Zaman pay them $75,000 in lost revenue.
If it was ‘strictly prohibited’, then how were they able to get the tickets? I smell a rat.
Skiplagged helps travelers find cheap tickets through a strategy called “hidden city” ticketing.
The idea is that you buy an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination.
Say you want to fly from New York to San Francisco. You book a flight from New York to Portland with a layover in San Francisco and get off there, without bothering to take the last leg of the flight. Sometimes, that can save you money. Flying this way isn’t always cheapest, but it often is.
Apparently the airline created its own problem. If they want to prevent that sort of thing, they need to adjust their pricing, not sue the guy who is taking advantage of the system that they set up.
Zaman says he and his lawyers realized early on that United’s case was flawed. United claimed Zaman broke the “contract of carriage,” but that’s a contract between passengers and airlines — not third parties like Skiplagged.
You’d think that their lawyers would have realized that. Figuring out who is bound by a contract is something they teach first semester at law school.
“I’m just providing people with information and making them more informed,” he said. “I never saw that as a bad thing, making people be more skilled travelers.”
And indeed it is not a bad thing, but rather a good thing. Access to information is one of the chief ways individual consumers can reverse the ancient advantage that vendors have in any market. This guy ought to get some sort of award.