Lufthansa Sues Passenger Who Missed His Flight – 'Hidden City' Trick
yro.slashdot.orgIt's kind of insane that airlines both overbook flights in hopes that somebody will accidentally miss a flight, but also get upset or sue people when they intentionally miss a flight. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
If they make a profit on a roundtrip, they definitely make even more profit if the passenger skips a flight. So how can they claim damages?
If you split it up in fixed and variable costs and you see that you can charge different amounts of money depending on destination it messes with their total profits.
Flying a plane has a certain fixed cost (it's not weightless or frictionless, so even an empty plane will consume fuel and have wear and tear, the pilot always costs the same).
You also have variable costs (more fuel consumed with more weight, more work in getting people through to the airplane at check-in, etc).
Now if your variable costs are lower than the cost of adding another passenger then you want to add that next passenger. It might be you're still unprofitable on this flight, but this passenger will lessen your financial burden, even if only marginally.
Now it may be that in order to offer flights at competitive prices to destination B from A, it's better cost wise to split it up in two legs via C.
So maybe on route A->(C)->B you are unprofitable, but because you have people booking A->C at a higher price your total becomes profitable.
However you need those unprofitable people on flight A->(C)->B, because otherwise your plane B is half empty and your plane A->C isn't quite full yet. But still you'd rather have more passengers in A->C.
Now people using these Hidden City tricks use your A->C->B ticket to get from A->C.
This destroys your profit margin, because now your flight A->C has just become unprofitable.
Another thing is this might lead to more people booked on C->B not showing up, thus they're flying with a half-empty plane again here, which they may be able to fill up from other sources of C.
Pricing can get quite complex, but it all makes sense at some level if you have the overview.
Flying A->B is more expensive than flying A->B->C. So you can get a cheaper A->B flight by booking a leg to C that you never intend to use. (For example because C is a destination the airline needs to compete on price aggressively with, while B is a destination with less competition so the airline sees an opportunity to have high prices there).
I have no idea why Lufthansa thinks this is within their rights according to the law, so it will be very interesting to see.
Because the courts have found it is acceptable? (The court here references a decision of the highest German court saying so, and rejected the claim only because Lufthansa wasn't transparent enough in how they calculated the difference)
Let me clarify: I have no idea how a legislator or court would think this is reasonable either; I'm equally interested in a courts justification to how an airline can force a customer to use both legs and this NOT being equivalent to e.g. McDonalds requiring people to finish both the burger+fries if the meal is cheaper than just the soda+burger.
The main argument against in this case seems to have been that it's a surprising clause in the terms (which would invalidate it), with the counter-argument being that it's well known that these price differences exist, and thus shouldn't be too surprising to a consumer that the airlines added rules against their "clever trick", because otherwise the pricing wouldn't make sense. Without a rule forbidding it, it's contractual freedom.
The case in front of the higher court was against airlines that cancelled tickets (and denied transportation) when a leg wasn't taken, and the court decided that this was too too unfair against customers that had legit reasons to not make use of the leg and offered the requirement to pay the difference as a compromise that still discourages passengers that plan this intentionally.
If I order a combo meal in McDonald's but don't eat the fries, will I be sued, because a burger plus coke separately is more expensive?
Where I live a combo always costs slightly more than a burger+drink or burger+fries. Where the third item is “only” 25 cents more, for example.