pinniped

CVG, DTW, and MSP are the three that come to mind in terms of still having a strong DL monopoly and uncompetitive pricing.

Most UA and AA hubs have too much competition either with each other or with LCC/ULCC's, or with a nearby airport. Maybe CLT is still a bit fortressy. I rarely have to fly there.

My $0.02 is that Southwest used to openly invite you to do hidden-city as a way to point out how different they once were from the rest of the oligopoly. It was their little way of saying "we don't need to cut shady political deals to create monopolies and gouge communities." But as time passed, they became more and more like the rest of the oligopoly, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day the slip in the language to ban hidden city. WN is no longer the edgy outsider antagonizing the rest of the players: it's firmly an insider now.

Marko123

How does one go about finding hidden city pairs on WN? Like mentioned above, they don't use the traditional hub & spoke model so does one just have to search many, many city combos?

nsx

If it were easy, anyone could do it.

pinniped

I've stumbled upon them when there's been a particularly good sale fare to a city for which my target (hidden) city is a logical connection.

But you aren't missing out on much - perhaps nothing at all if you like earning points. Where these exist on WN, it's rare that they are *huge*. Unlike the CVG and DTW possibilities that sometimes exist on DL.

Marko123

Makes sense, the ones I have seen have been accidental, and I think the max savings I saw was $30-$40.

xliioper

DL's CVG operation is hardly a "monopoly" these days. You do realize they went from over 600 flights/day to somewhere around 100? Here are the average originating air fares at those airports, plus SLC and ATL, for 4Q2016.

MSP $371
DTW $370
CVG $367
SLC $350
ATL $339

In contrast, here are the average fares at UA's IAH and EWR hubs which appear to me to be a lot more "fortress-like" than DL's hubs.

IAH $430
EWR $417

pinniped

I hardly consider NYC a fortress hub for anyone since all 3 majors plus Southwest have a strong presence there. I personally don't have difficulty finding reasonable airfares to New York.

Houston...not really familiar with the market. It does seem like a United fortress, although I don't know to what extent WN tempers it. I've only flown *to* Houston (as opposed to connecting) twice: once to IAH and once to HOU. Long ago on business trips, so didn't pay close attention to the fares. (I've connected through IAH 15-20 times over the years and through HOU a few times as well.)

MSP and DTW are still cities I visit regularly and have never once found a good leisure fare on DL. If it's gotten better for business travelers, I have no idea. We usually drive MSP and fly Spirit to DTW, but I do check DL and sometimes even look for a hidden-city opportunity. Spirit's fares to Detroit are obscenely low (I mean, it's Spirit ...last one we bought was $36), and DL Basic Economy does not attempt to match it.

I just threw in some far-in-the-future dates and immediately found hidden-city opportunities for MSP and CVG. (MCI-ORD being the ticketed itin.) Still nice big ones for CVG...$114 one-way to ORD, $287 one-way to CVG. Magnitude at MSP was narrower...the $114 to ORD was $136 to MSP, perhaps thanks to WN's presence (albeit barely) on the route.

vegaslover8

My CLE- SFO (getting off in LAS) flight went down by $5 or 335 points.

Any reason not to rebook? I am using points for what it's worth.

Often1

The number of people who engage in this is minimal. People go online and book a ticket to their destination.

I doubt that WN advertises exceptions to its COC as a brand differentiator. Even the "two free bags" doesn't really do it, given that its bread & butter customer doesn't check two bags and most elites on any carrier don't pay for a checked bag anyway.

Every marketing study out there shows that price & convenience are the differentiators.

pinniped

They don't anymore. They've apparently removed previous "go ahead and do it" language and now remain silent on the matter.

General consensus around here is that you can still do it on Southwest (including informing the connecting GA of your intentions) without negative consequences beyond some points not posting.

Agreed that it's a statistically minimal thing. Tiny tiny fraction of a percent of all travelers.

nsx

If you didn't use ticketless funds for the $5.60 fee and if you care about preserving refundability of that $5.60 you would need to cancel and rebook rather than just change the reservation.

rsteinmetz70112

I believe the original intent was to stick it to the other carriers and their often absurd pricing where a hidden city could literally save hundreds of dollars. The "Majors" called it "Ticket Fraud" which is of course absurd. The 'Legacies" have wised up and such flagrant inequities are less common.

Years ago my wife was traveling to Savannah on Delta, of course, that required a change of planes in Atlanta. She booked he flight weeks in advance. The flight was around $375. A few weeks later, still well in advance of her trip she needed to change her reservations and stop over in Atlanta for a day. Delta wanted $1,200 to change her existing reservation. She could have bought the Atlanta leg one way for less than $200, of course if she "no-showed" for the first leg of her trip that were going to cancel the rest of her trip. She could have bought a entire new trip on her new itinerary for a little over $700 and lost the entire cost of the first ticket. It turned out to be least expensive to fly to Atlanta and return home then fly out the next day to Savannah on her original ticket. Everybody lost out on that transaction.

Who was defrauding who in that situation?

Often1

Nobody.

Your wife agreed to one contract, executed that contract, agreed to another contract and then executed that contract. The fact that she chose to purchase non-refundable tickets was hers, not DL's. Flying through fortress hubs such as ATL on DL, DFW on AA, IAH on UA and so on, is always going to cost a fortune because people are willing to pay the price for the convenience.

WN's lack of a hidden city ticketing fraud prohibition is way too over-personalized here. Different markets = different fares. That's called price discrimination. The WN business model is much more point-to-point than hub-and-spoke so it doesn't prohibit the practice (the change in COC language simply cleans up poor drafting).

Everybody who travels a lot can point to some situation where nobody made out on one individual ticket or series of tickets. But, DL could care less. It is looking at preserving its fortress hub at ATL, not at whether your wife had to fly an extra micro-hop out and back to some outstation.

WN doesn't have a fortress hub and doesn't even really have hubs (just places where people connect because it may have the MDW market but not Chicago and BWI, but not Washington-Baltimore).

If you want to skip that last segment on WN, just do it. If it's the next gate over and there is no line, feel free to stroll by and find an agent if you have time to waste. Otherwise, don't bother.

rsteinmetz70112

I don't argue with that, but parties are free to amend contracts on mutually agreeable terms.

The terms offered by Delta to modify the existing contract were extremely unreasonable and irrational. Similar actions by airlines over many years often against their own financial interest has lead to the widespread anger against them.

synergistic

In my mind, definitely a situation where representatives should be empowered to make exceptions. Whether a passenger or a shareholder, the end result was negative. At the very least, there should have been a way to protect the second leg of her itinerary after a "no show" to ATL. Instead, she occupied an otherwise saleable seat in both directions.

Out of curiosity, would she have been comfortable paying the same amount she ended up paying for the ATL round trip as a sort of "change fee" to save herself the two unnecessary legs, if they'd been able to work that out?