MikeMpls-

I was going to post that one and 3 other cases...all within the last 4.5 years that disprove the entire mallarchy that a very tiny number of Delta folks and supporters insist upon saying repetitively here.

As I posted earlier, they know niether contract law, aviation law, DOT regulations, Rules of Court, nor evidentiary procedure.

I even get PM's from them showing their unwillingness to learn or help FT members by providing just facts, as you appear to be the best at doing.

So, we should all let this pointless argument by them die.

I will PM a mod to shut this one down.

Next time I want to take a 3rd checked bag, I'll use your method, tell them the contract of carriage isn't really a contract, that I agree to no such unilaterally imposed checked bag fee, and that they need to take my bag anyway. If I win, you'll be the first to know.

If you want to drag PM's into the public area of the forum, you send PM's displaying your own unwillingness to do anything but speak your unassailable wisdom without supporting your position, so I'm not sure why you're surprised at the responses you get back. I, for one, would love to hear the two reasons why the Contract of Carriage isn't really a contract, as that has implications beyond just back-to-back ticketing. But you don't seem to want to support your arguments, only tell other people theirs are wrong. I'm happy to be wrong, but I'm not going to agree I'm wrong just because you tell me so... you have to convince me why.

A shame that people feel the need to take this topic so personally, because it is clearly ripe for discussion.

I understand both sides of this issue, but I feel like there can definitely be a gray area. In some cases, it would come down to the intent of the person booking the travel, which isn't always easy to determine.

Someone mentioned a few pages ago, if a flyer regularly works somewhere Monday to Thursday, and lives somewhere Friday to Sunday, they could theoretically save money by booking the flight round trip Thursday to Sunday from the city they work in.

I know people that commute cross country with basically this exact schedule every week for over a year. I don't know how they book their tickets, but I would assume that some on here would say that if they booked round trips from their work location, it would be against the CoC.

For this to be against the CoC though, where the person lived and worked would have to be Delta's business, which is a slippery slope. One would need to claim that all RT travel should start where a person lives, and that's clearly ridiculous and none of Delta's business.

I think that would be fine. If I live in ATL and work in SFO, I would be able to buy a one-way ticket from ATL-SFO, then book round-trips every weekend SFO-ATL. Then when I stopped working in SFO, a one-way ticket back home.

What wouldn't be okay is:
Ticket #1: ATL-SFO (Monday, week 1), SFO-ATL (Friday, week 2)
Ticket #2: SFO-ATL (Friday, week 1), ATL-SFO (Monday, week 2)

So you're citing a Westlaw digest as a point of law? And where'd you go to law school? The Court held that the airlines in this case were not entitled to use the fraud prevention defense based on the facts alleged. Those allegations were that DL, NW and US had conspired to enforce hidden-city ticketing rules. As the Court put it:

"Plaintiffs' § 1 claim goes beyond the mere sharing of information, and charges that Defendants agreed to a concerted course of action."

In other words, you can't use the fraud prevention defense to justify a horizontal agreement among airlines to enforce a remedy against fraud. And here's what I said:

So long as the airlines didn't agree on a remedy, there is no antitrust violation.

So I never said airlines can use fraud prevention to justify a horizontal agreement to restrain trade. What I said was that airlines could use the Cement Manufacturers case as a justification for exchanging information about suspected back-to-back ticketing itineraries so long as they did not agree on how to remedy the ticketing fraud. Which is precisely what the Court said:

"By way of contrast, the practice of “back-to-back” ticketing might require cooperative preventative measures, because the two tickets purchased to accomplish this result can be from two different airlines, so long as both fly between the passenger's point of origin and destination."

Now for hidden-city ticketing (which was the focus of the Chase case), there would be no need to exchange information since the itinerary is, by definition, all sold by a single carrier. But we're talking about back-to-back ticketing. So please explain where I made a single misstatement of fact or law in my post.

Moreover, your reading of the procedural history of the case is equally wrong. That decision was not Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment on the antitrust claim; it was Defendants' motion for summary judgment (which was denied) and Plaintiffs' motion for class certification (which was granted in part). The case effectively ended because each of the three defendants went bankrupt (US Airways in 2004, DL and NW in 2005).

So for all your tough talk about my lack of legal acumen, all you've shown is that you care about facts as little as you care about the Conditions of Carriage.

Your rhetoric would make Joe McCarthy blush. You don't get PMs from me, and I doubt you get them from anyone else. You boast of all you know, but never state what it is you claim to know. And everything in your posts is wrong.

Feel free to shut this thread down. Lord knows you can't win with facts.

Spot on. The issue is not whether you're getting a better fare, or where you live. It's taking itineraries out of order for the purpose of evading a fare rule. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between an itinerary that is fraudulent and one that is just abnormal.

I wonder if all the fraud-defenders here would support agencies' other tricks, such as:

--Booking AAA-BBB-CCC, then canceling BBB-CCC in an effort to trick the GDSs into giving them lower inventory availability on AAA-BBB. Airlines put in a fix by "marrying" the segments together, so agencies figured out how to trick the system by booking codeshare or interline itineraries to defeat married segment control.

--Booking segments in the premium cabin with fictitious names like "MOUSE/MICKEY" and "DUCK/DONALD" to hold space so their customers could upgrade when those bookings no-showed.

--Or my personal favorite, literally going into the GDS and repricing $2,300 tickets for $230, hoping that corporate security wouldn't notice.

It would be nice if airline IT were able to effectively crack down on ticketing fraud, but the sad reality is that agents are pretty clever folks.

Say it's not true!

People would actually book a segment or several with a COMPETING AIRLINE to reduce costs? How dare they?

That is simply horrific!

Thank you for your continued contributions to my regularly scheduled entertainment. :)

I take it from the fact that you completely ignored my rebuttal on the Chase case, you acknowledge that you were wrong.

As for married segment fraud, you honestly defend the practice? So if there is T inventory available for SEA-ATL-JAX, but not for ATL-JAX, and you book an interline itinerary of SEA-(AS)-ATL-(DL)-JAX in T inventory that DL intends to see ticketed using a JAXSEA fare, then cancel the SEA-(AS)-ATL segment to trick the GDS into giving you T inventory on the ATL-(DL)-JAX fare on an ATLJAX fare when DL did not have T open for the local O&D, that's okay to you?

To be clear, you are okay with lying to the airline about wanting to fly SEA-JAX in order to trick them into giving you a T-class segment of ATL-JAX, which they do not want to sell to local passengers, then dropping the SEA-ATL segment which you had no intention of flying, and ticketing using an ATLJAX fare. That's not fraud to you? It's not okay for DL to decide it wants to hold seats for SEA-JAX passengers, instead of selling them to local ATL-JAX passengers? Why?

What if you just went to the airport with a gun and demanded they empty the registers? Would you find that wrong, or is stealing from airlines just okay in your book?

P.S. - learn the difference between booking and ticketing. Just because you book it doesn't mean you ticket it. That's how the fraud works. You book, then drop the segment, then ticket using stolen inventory and a fare the airline did not want to sell you to begin with.

Nice leap off a cliff. I acknowledged no such thing. I quit reading after your ridiculous suggestion that that booking with competing airlines to reduce costs is somehow "fraudulent".

As in this case -- what I've responded to is all I bothered to read. When your premises are bogus, the rest isn't worth reading.

Translation: "I have no rebuttal."

Since you clearly have no clue about the difference between booking and ticketing, allow me to explain:

"Booking" is pulling up segments on a GDS. It is the process of grabbing inventory out of the buckets and holding it.

A "booking" will then price at the appropriate fare, based on: (a) the booking class; and (b) the fare rules (you know, those conditions of sale you feel morally justified in ignoring). However, you can go in a GDS, make a booking, and not pay a dime.

"Ticketing" is the act of associating the booking with a ticket. Your ticket has a ticket number (e.g., for DL it would be 006########). Your booking has a PNR (e.g., for DL it would be AB1CD2).

Now the fraud does not involve ticketing with two competing airlines. Rather, it involves manipulating a booking to trick the system into giving you a lower booking class than the airline has made available. Thus, for example, assume DL was offering T inventory for JAN-ATL-DCA, but only L inventory for ATL-DCA. If you looked at ATL-DCA on the GDS, it would show T0, but if you looked at JAN-DCA, the connections over Atlanta would show T9 on both segments.

However, some enterprising travel agent who shares your belief that stealing from airlines is okay figures out a way around this. They book JAN-ATL-DCA in T class. They then take the booking and cancel out the JAN-ATL segment, leaving them with a T-class booking on ATL-DCA and that is what is ticketed. Now the airlines figured out how to block this by "marrying" the segments. This means that in the GDS, you can't cancel just one segment - you have to cancel all of them. So travel agents figured out that they could try and use interline availability (which can't be married in the current systems) to pull the same fraud. In both cases, the travel is all on one airline. It's just a question of the mechanism used to trick the system.

So this has nothing to do with buying a codeshare itinerary, or booking with competing airlines, to save money. It is about tricking the GDSs into releasing low inventory buckets for O&Ds that are closed. If you had a even a shred of a clue about the airline industry, you'd know that.

Continue to flame away on facts you don't like and can't refute.

Since I've gone off this dead horse, I wonder why this is SOOO important to you two that you have to keep going at it. Just agree to disagree. And for the most part, airlines have gone off these stupid excursion tickets and gone to one-way fare constructs. Make more sense, and avoid any legal hassles, plus look at all the money airlines can save on doing away with the enforcement department.

Yes, I agree that we disagree on the issue of fraud being unethical behavior. It's only important to me in the sense that I am annoyed by people who break the rules, which then forces those of us who abide by them to pay higher fares on average to pay for the cost of their fraud. Sort of like how it irritates me that people who overextended on interest-only ARMs get bailed out on their mortgages, while stupid old me who bought an affordable home with a fixed-rate mortgage gets to pay both for my mortgage and their bailout.

And yes, there are fewer excursion fares today than there were 10 years ago. For a time (around 2004 or 2005 I think), DL dropped all of them. But then the complexity in fares rules came back. But hidden-city fraud still runs rampant even with one-way fares. The fraud I describe above continues to plague airlines. So revenue integrity is still an important issue for airlines. Pardon me for being interested in seeing an industry get the benefit of enforcing their contracts.

P.S. - You may have gone off of it, but others, like MikeMpls, have not. Contrary to your apparent belief, you deciding a debate is over doesn't mean it is over for others.

That's an inappropriate troll. Fraud is an unethical behaviour, indeed, but ticketing arrangements that aren't exactly to the CoC of the carrier are not, in the criminal sense, fraud. And you know that. AA on their own website states that it's not criminal fraud (theft, or whatever you want to call it). So please use this word carefully and lightly. An example of real fraud is this story (http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/loc...ase-848149.php)

If we can all agree on one thing: Fraud needs to leave the discussion entirely. It's an inflammatory and inappropriate description of dis-approved ticketing arrangements.

So, please, all of the DL and other airline advocates, I hope you can realize that opposing opinions are not only valid, but have been shown to be legally supportable. A good discussion on this is found in this article: http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0816.htm

Another story is told about Justice Scalia from the Supreme Court admitting to purchasing a round-trip ticket instead of a more expensive one way. If you wish to stand here and call a Supreme Court Justice a criminal fraudster, be my guest.

QUOTE
"Practical Traveler; Is Justice Served by Ticket Rules?
By Susan Stellin
Published: April 04, 2004

ASSOCIATE JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA of the Supreme Court inadvertently raised a hot-button travel issue last month in explaining why he was not recusing himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney.

Offering details about his January duck-hunting trip with the vice president, Justice Scalia revealed that even though he had flown to Louisiana on the vice president's plane, he bought a round-trip ticket on a commercial airline to return to Washington, because it was less expensive than the one-way fare.

It's a tactic familiar to anyone who has discovered one-way fares can be triple the price of flying one way. But most travelers probably don't know that five of the six largest United States airlines - American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and US Airways - explicitly prohibit buying a round-trip ticket with the intention of throwing half away."

No, we can't agree on that. And I don't see any fundamental ethical difference between the facts of the story you cite, and hidden-city or back-to-back ticketing.

From Merriam-Webster, fraud is the "intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right." Back-to-back and hidden-city ticketing are an intentional perversion of truth (misleading the airline about your true itinerary) in order to induce the airline to part with something of value (a seat) for less than they would otherwise part with it.

What I find most amusing is that you treat AA.com's statements about the criminality of ticketing fraud as the gospel truth, but the statements which prohibit hidden-city and back-to-back ticketing you choose to ignore.

I will agree with you on one thing. You will never change my mind, and I will never change yours.