With the price of plane tickets soaring, some travellers are seeking increasingly convoluted ways to save money when booking a flight. Techniques to avoid paying extra for legroom are multiplying on travel influencer pages, and another cost-cutting method being employed by some money-savvy customers, often called “skiplaggers”, has even faced legal challenges from airlines.
What is skiplagging?
Skiplagging, also known as “hidden-city flying” or “throwaway ticketing” involves buying a ticket for a flight with multiple segments, and only actually flying for part of the journey.
Non-direct routes with stopovers are slower and therefore cheaper than faster, more desirable, direct flights which airlines can charge more for due to high demand. If you were looking at flights from London to New York, you might sacrifice some time and choose a non-direct route, via Frankfurt say, because you’re on a budget.
But skiplaggers manage to avoid the high costs of direct flights, while still getting a direct flight. The trick? They find out whether there’s a “non-direct flight” with a stopover in what is in fact their final destination, and then simply disembark at the supposed stopover, having paid less for what was supposed to be an inconvenient multi-stage journey.
@usatoday Skiplagging, or hidden city ticketing, is the latest travel hack for fliers, but there are risks. Here’s why.
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Only applicable in limited circumstances
This hack can only be applied in limited circumstances. First, it only works for portion A to B of an A-B-C journey. You cannot embark at point B wanting to fly to C, having paid to fly from A. What’s more, you’ll need to be prepared to travel with cabin bags only instead of any checked luggage, because checked luggage will fly on without you to the proper terminus. Even if you’re a light packer, on busy flights there is a risk your cabin bag will need to be checked-in anyway.
Beware: once you’ve missed a portion of a flight, your whole ticket will be cancelled by the airline, whose terms and conditions of carriage you will have just broken. Therefore you cannot use skiplagging for return journeys, as you simply will not be allowed to fly. Instead you have to buy multiple “skiplagging” one way tickets, which is a time-consuming and not necessarily profitable process.
Is it legal?
If you employ skiplagging a lot, the airlines will likely catch up with you. One skiplagger was met by law enforcement in Florida, and both Lufthansa and United have pursued the matter through the courts, which for the time being appear to be on the consumers’ side, especially in Spain, where the booking method has been deemed perfectly legal.
But airlines remain at liberty to revoke any benefits you might have accrued on a loyalty scheme, or even to ban you altogether – a significant disincentive.
Delays, emissions, overbookings, and higher prices
If you’re still tempted by skiplagging, you might want to consider the knock-on effects of the practice, both on other flyers, and ultimately yourself. Skiplagging causes delays, as airlines search for missing flyers known to be at airports and verify the absentee is not a security risk and does not have luggage aboard the plane.
Per-person emissions go through the roof when there are empty seats on a flight. Airlines cannot resell a ticket even if the seat has been bought by a no-show customer, and they estimate the amount of fuel needed on passenger weight, so fuel is burnt unnecessarily as a result of skiplagging.
Finally, airlines will adapt their pricing and websites, and simply “adjust algorithms to account for a higher no-show rate on flights,” Simple Flying points out. “This will likely lead to more overbookings, hurting the consumer’s wallet and experience in the long run.”
