seagar

+1...Now that United has taken away the benefits I earned as a million miler, used all my miles and now fly anything but UAL, I may just come back on occasion. As pointed out earlier, what can they do, bar me from future flights? They may stop this site but how could they possibly stop the practice unless they change their pricing policies? So even eliminating this site from 'mentioning" hidden city does not stop it. What a crazy airline to be driven by attorneys but then again we do have $misek as the head cheerlegal. Marketing must be going crazy at UAL for all their blunders...

Darlox

I would suspect they did... Launching this kind of suit without warning would weaken their case. None of the stories say, but this almost certainly didn't hit out of the blue, with a legal notice served to the kid's mother...

Unlikely on the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" theory, and the fact that large agencies were able to negotiate. Plus who wants to litigate on an "industry internal" matter like this, unless you have no choice, or a significant income incentive? (Which the agents would never have had, based on HCT.)

Also, at the time Skiplagged was allowing this kind of search, no CoC existed. UA essentially has to prove that he incited people to violate a contract that they had not yet actually agreed to! And that the customers entered into the contract with premeditated plans to violate it. Tortious interference requires a valid contract to exist before a 3rd party can interfere with it. At best, UA is in hitherto untested waters...

CO_Nonrev_elite

It just smells of the usual we will screw you over with any gap in the rules we can find to punish the customer, but will sue you if you do likewise.

United has a terrible reputation with the public and in most cases, it's over petty things that United didn't need to do. There are multiple United lawsuit stories doing the main headline news at the moment (United suing 22yr old / United suing 68yr old passenger for changing seats / United Wins judgement against it's most frequent flyers, but the judge basically testifies that while they are technically acting within the law, they are basically a disgusting company)

None of these things help United sell tickets, and add to that, they are having a brutal month operationally. Delta will finish close to 20% ahead of United in on-time this month. Almost across the board United makes many really short sighted decisions.

kd_LAX

I just contributed to the Crowdfunding for the owner of Skiplagged's defense against United's greedy and ridiculous lawsuit.

I used my United Mileage Plus Chase Visa so I'll get miles for the contribution!

https://www.gofundme.com/skiplagged/

kd_LAX
Mileage Plus 1K
Million Miler

toomanybooks

Then WN needs to have a chat with a couple guys I could name. There are TONS of Hidden-City routes on WN.

787fan

It clearly states that if you book the ticket, you're entering into that binding contract. Just because they didn't make another separate "accept contract" button doesn't mean the consumer didn't agree to it.

There are tons of consumer contracts out there that doesn't require signing in a box before it's binding. If the argument is "dumb consumer got duped into signing a contract they don't know about", then the website is already proven guilty because Skiplagged failed to clearly disclose any consequence of the consumer clicking the link and following through with the booking process.

There's a very clear reason why Skiplagged is named but ITA Matrix and Hipmunk aren't even though they provide essentially the same functionality - those require you to enter in the airport pairs, so the liability falls on the consumer for knowingly search HCT, while Skiplagged is giving links of SFO-JFK-BOS when the customer specifically searched SFO-JFK only, so the liability falls at the search result provider.

pinniped

The difference is that traditional nesting took you back to the point of origin and often had an obvious purpose of circumventing a fare rule, usually a minimum stay or Saturday night stay.

EoE takes you onward to a third city and generally doesn't circumvent a fare rule. (Presumably the rules for both of these cover things like coterminals...) That's why it's generally permitted.

I've done EoE dozens of times. I've even done straight nesting a few times in college, well before I knew that airlines *might* care, and no one ever cared. My hunch is that their queries look for people doing it often and to violate some other rule, whereas mine were simply tickets that spanned an academic year with a bunch of other travel in the middle.

GUWonder

And what is their business model, as in how did the site (and/or its owners/operators) make money (if any) from users of the site?

Alpha Golf

Won't quote your catchy handle -- but curious what happened. Did you pay? Did they back off?

channa

Didn't the courts just argue that the DOT was the only channel for airline-related items?

Maybe they should tell UA to go to the DOT on this one then.

pdsales

Thank you for sharing the gofundme.com site, the bigger the number the more United will realize that they just gave Skiplagged tons of free publicity and defacto underdog status. America loves underdogs! I gave $20.

toomanybooks

Wow, over $22K already.

Wonder how many people worldwide have just learned about "Hidden-City" in the last week. A lot, I reckon.

Rusdude

Well... in a sense UA accomplished what it set out to do Skiplagged is not functional at the moment due to crazy amount of traffic

P.S. Add me to the list of people who hadn't heard of this site before I read a news article. Thanks, United!

GUWonder

I had heard about the site much earlier this year but didn't care to check it out until today. It's so popular today that I will have to try to use it later.

Darlox

I think you may have missed my point... Skiplagged's alleged activity occurred BEFORE the consumer agreed to (or was even presented with) any contract.

If I run a mapping service, and I inform you that if you drive 60 mph you can make it to your destination in 1 hour, or if you drive 120 mph you can make it there in 30 minutes -- and you subsequently drive 120 mph and cause an accident, am I liable for your behavior because I did the math for you?

Or, maybe more applicable, if I point out to you in advance that signing a contract with Company X, and then breaking that contract later on, would be 20% more profitable to you than honoring your contract, am I liable for informing you of that fact?

Legally, the answer is actually "maybe". But it's a VERY different argument than if you're already in a contract, and I come along and say "I'll give you $100 to break your contract with Company X." It's also insanely difficult to prove pre-contract interference with liability attached, even when you have piles of examples where such activity may have occurred.

Based on how, when and for what stated reasons this lawsuit was filed, it's really difficult to believe that this is anything other than an ill-advised (from a PR standpoint) attempt to crush an un-incorporated startup on un-tested legal grounds.