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what to do when airline warned me about numerous throw-away ticketing? ($95 vs $497)

what to do when airline warned me about numerous throw-away ticketing? ($95 vs $497)

Old Sep 14, 2015, 2:33 pm
  #1111  
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Originally Posted by nkedel
Wouldn't common carrier status prevent them from discriminating in this way?
In practice, they are most likely to cut off a travel agent that issuing a lot of hidden-city tickets (or improperly nested tickets, etc.). I've seen the AA form letters (here on FT, somewhere) and they are tailored to the TA audience.

A travel agent advising a lot of clients to fly hidden-city would be seen by the airline as a lot bigger "problem", and I assume there's no common carrier issues with kicking one out of your booking system.

I remember right when I first started traveling for work in the 1990s, our corp TA gave everyone an information sheet about do's and don'ts and guarded against anything that would offend the airline. I remember an agent saying once "They wouldn't come after you, but they could definitely make life hard for us." We did a lot of repeat trips to the same city (long projects), so the main thing wasn't hidden city - it was nested tickets. The TA made sure that the first flight out to a client site was a one-way ticket, with subsequent Friday-Monday roundtrips, followed by a one-way at the end of the project.
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 2:45 pm
  #1112  
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Originally Posted by Often1
It's of course a matter of local law, but in the US and most legal systems on which the US is based, it's also an easy calculation.

The passenger contracted for a ticket A-C and chose to fly A-C.
ITYM "chose to fly A-B."

Many years ago, I read about a nasty trick: during the layover in B, go to the airport bar and get drunk. Spill some alcohol on yourself while you're at it.

Now when you show up to fly B-C, the airline will deny boarding because you're drunk. Let them.

Under the rules at the time, they even had to refund part of your ticket price.
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 2:54 pm
  #1113  
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Originally Posted by sethb
ITYM "chose to fly A-B."

Many years ago, I read about a nasty trick: during the layover in B, go to the airport bar and get drunk. Spill some alcohol on yourself while you're at it.

Now when you show up to fly B-C, the airline will deny boarding because you're drunk. Let them.

Under the rules at the time, they even had to refund part of your ticket price.
Very creative...

I'm not sure I'd want to try to walk that fine line: hammered enough to get IDB, but not hammered enough to get a visit from the local airport police. Emphasis on "many years ago"...this is a risky strategy in 2015.
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 3:02 pm
  #1114  
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Originally Posted by nkedel
Wouldn't common carrier status prevent them from discriminating in this way?
I don't think so. "People who have tried to defraud is" are not a legally protected class. If you could prove that repeated hidden city ticketing is statistically correlated with being female, disabled, gay, of a specific religion or ethnic group, or in any other protected class, you might be able to make a case - as when minimum height restrictions are held to discriminate against women - but in this case I doubt any such argument would fly. So, neither would the passenger who tried to make it.
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 3:08 pm
  #1115  
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Originally Posted by Efrem
I don't think so. "People who have tried to defraud is" are not a legally protected class. If you could prove that repeated hidden city ticketing is statistically correlated with being female, disabled, gay, of a specific religion or ethnic group, or in any other protected class, you might be able to make a case - as when minimum height restrictions are held to discriminate against women - but in this case I doubt any such argument would fly. So, neither would the passenger who tried to make it.
Which leads us back to whether using a hidden-city ticket would be deemed as fraud, and that's something I don't believe the airlines want to actually test in court.

But it begs the broader question: we know airlines do issue lifetime bans to people for behaving badly on planes. So somewhere there is precedent that the airlines are allowed to boot bad passengers. If said bad passenger appeals the airline's decision, how does he/she go about doing it? Is the burden of proof on the passenger to prove he didn't do the bad thing in question, or on the airline to prove he did?
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 6:24 pm
  #1116  
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Originally Posted by pinniped
In practice, they are most likely to cut off a travel agent that issuing a lot of hidden-city tickets (or improperly nested tickets, etc.). I've seen the AA form letters (here on FT, somewhere) and they are tailored to the TA audience.
TAs have a much more specific business relationship than "I'm a random customer," as do those big corporate customers who set up a contract with a given airline a preferred carrier.

Similarly, there's definitely no common carrier issue with cancelling someone's frequent flier account.

Much harder to argue refusing to sell a ticket at all, or refusing carriage if someone is sold a ticket. Has anyone seen any evidence of their airlines having their own blacklist over this sort of issue?

(Indeed, absent law enforcement being involved, do they have any sort of blacklist at all?)

Originally Posted by Efrem
I don't think so. "People who have tried to defraud is" are not a legally protected class.
Proving intentional fraud (or even proving a given set of damages) is a much harder thing than proving "broke the terms of a contract somehow."
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Old Sep 14, 2015, 7:31 pm
  #1117  
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Originally Posted by nkedel
...

Originally Posted by Efrem
I don't think so. "People who have tried to defraud is" are not a legally protected class.
Proving intentional fraud (or even proving a given set of damages) is a much harder thing than proving "broke the terms of a contract somehow."
This confuses two separate issues:

1. Is an airline within its rights to refuse service to someone who has repeatedly tried to defraud it? I contend, in the quoted post, that it is.

2. Would it be easy to prove that Person X is a member of this class? I did not address that point. I tend to agree that it would not be in general. However, if an airline wanted to make an example of someone, they'd pick someone where they were certain of winning. I wouldn't want to bet against them. (Airlines have more legal resources than most of us, too.)

Added in edit: It's also possible that the "wronged" flyer will sue the airline. I doubt most of us have enough legal resources or attach enough importance to this issue to take that route, but some might. If that happened, I think the airline would cave, with perhaps a symbolic concession on the part of the passenger so it would look like a compromise, if it didn't have an airtight case because it wouldn't want to set a precedent.

Last edited by Efrem; Sep 15, 2015 at 7:01 am
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Old Sep 16, 2015, 12:31 pm
  #1118  
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Originally Posted by nkedel
Much harder to argue refusing to sell a ticket at all, or refusing carriage if someone is sold a ticket. Has anyone seen any evidence of their airlines having their own blacklist over this sort of issue?

(Indeed, absent law enforcement being involved, do they have any sort of blacklist at all?)
I've never actually seen any evidence...I don't know anyone personally who's been blacklisted from an airline. I'm just going on various media reports I've read, sometimes involving a celebrity and other times just involving a few rowdy drunks, about people getting banned. I think even a few where the airline itself commented for the article, confirming the ban existed. Locations varied, but I know some were based in the US or EU where most of the airlines we discuss here are regulated.

How they enforce it, I don't know. And I have never heard or read anything about a permanent ban for no-showing segments of a flight. But I do believe the capability exists for airlines to blacklist people.
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Old Sep 16, 2015, 2:08 pm
  #1119  
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Practically speaking:

1. TA's are in a commercial relationship. Cut off that relationship and they go under.

2. Simply closing, zeroing out and eliminating status is likely more than sufficient to get carriers what they want. While it's true that not everybody is a FF, it's likely a significant % of those who engage in this stuff.

Firing a customer for this doesn't seem in the cards just yet.

For what it's worth, when AA cracked down on the sale/barter of award tickets and shut off a bunch of scammers, there was much bleating on FT from people who swore that it was bad PR for AA and that the place would go belly up over it. Hasn't happened yet.
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Old Sep 23, 2015, 7:58 am
  #1120  
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Originally Posted by Often1
For what it's worth, when AA cracked down on the sale/barter of award tickets and shut off a bunch of scammers, there was much bleating on FT from people who swore that it was bad PR for AA and that the place would go belly up over it. Hasn't happened yet.
What's the cognitive bias where we assume that everybody is like us? We have to admit it: FT'ers are a weird and VERY niche bunch.

It reminds me of the threads where we swear that the latest status match or fast-track scheme is going to bring down a program by flooding it with millions of new elites. In reality, those status-matched elites aren't going to comprise 0.001% of total paid elite-miles flown...
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Old Sep 24, 2015, 7:49 pm
  #1121  
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Originally Posted by wendyg
The our-way-or-the-highway is increasingly an issue in many contracts consumers get stuck with - see also mobile phones, software, and everything on the internet.

wg
I outright own said phone, though, and have SIM only contracts.
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