...but I meant to convey a suspicion that the suit is probably an anticompetitive move.

dang, ringin up the boss *old* school!

http://www.springsteenlyrics.com/lyrics/0/4thofjulyasburypark.php

Book flights to the far east with a non-Hong Kong destination, but a stop there. Just threw away that last coupon and stopped in Hong Kong.

Travel agents could do it back then.

I used to fly to Colorado, meet a friend, drive to DC, then fly back to SF. It was cheaper to book a round trip SF to DC to SF (layover in Denver) than SF to Denver, then DC to SF. The airline didn't like you not using one leg of the flight and were ready to ding you for the full amount for the chopped up flight.

I got around that one year by giving my seat to a cello from the Aspen Music festival. The airline, having mistreated the cello in baggage on the way out, was happy to accept the solution.

If you can't carry it all on, send via parcel post or UPS.

and then, when some people ordered the combo and threw out the fries, they cried foul and said "you MUST EAT THE FRIES!"


the airline can fly an empty seat for the skipped leg and still get a better deal than they bargained for as they save on fuel. this in a rare lawsuit in which the "victim" has actually come out ahead and yet that's not good enough for them.

using a hidden city or a point beyond was a legitimate way to construct a ticket. I believe the airlines themselves stopped allowing those as legitimate means to construct a ticket some years ago. When we did that, you didn't actually write a ticket for an unused segment. You just showed what you'd done in the fare construction box.

Let me explain ticketing and some terms here. In reality, the example shown is a point beyond, because the traveller is going to San Francisco first, with Lake Tahoe as a point beyond San Francisco, with a cheaper fare than just to SFO, and the segment from SFO to TVL is not actually flown. Nor should it be ticketed. A hidden city would be breaking the fare at an intermediate point between the origin and destination. In this case, if the fare from NYC to Lake Tahoe plus the fare from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco is cheaper than the fare from NYC to San Francisco, you'd show those two fares. However, in actual practice it would be rare that the two point to point fares be cheaper than the one fare between origin and destination.

The other thing that matters here, and most people haven't a clue about, is that the airlines have specific route maps tied to route numbers, and all the cities along those route maps. The cities in question have to be on the specific route map to make the use of a hidden city or point beyond work. If the fare is published as NYC to SFO and shows no cities in between, you can neither break the fare anywhere, nor show a point beyond. However, if the fare published from NYC to TVL (Lake Tahoe) does show SFO on the route map between those two cities and that fare is cheaper than the NYC-SFO one, then you can show TVL as a point beyond.

I used to read those route maps in my spare time when I worked at DCA, and I got quite good at figuring out good points beyond. This was well before these things were computerized. But a true hidden city, where you break the fare at some intermediate point was rarely a good option, although it did sometimes happen. But you had to do a lot of looking for fares and checking out the routings to do it back then. By the late 1970's (I worked 1969-1979) the airlines were beginning to change their route maps and pricing structure so as to drastically minimize the usage point beyond fares.

penalty. I am vaguely remembering this (I was a TA starting in 1981) and thought we warned people that they had to cancel their return leg (the TVL-SFO) in enough time that the remaining leg would not be cancelled and also that they would be subject to paying the full fare if caught. I don't remember that this was a legit practice though it was done.

The hidden city though was a legit practice and I believe we would write 2 separate rt tickets NYC-SFO-NYC and then SFO-TVL-SFO

My memory could be failing me though. I was only a TA for 8 or 9 years and then moved into the software/automation part of the business.

to that city, not back when I worked. Just that you show the fare calculation. Also, when writing the fare breakdown, the agent would draw a circle around that point beyond city, which told everyone else who looked at the ticket just how the fare was calculated. Back when I was an agent, it was totally legitimate and we were encouraged to write tickets that way if we could find the fares. Since only the reservations system itself was computerized at this point, and only a few airlines were even at that point, we had to look everything up in these massive books we had at the ticket counters.

Because the fare calculation box was vertical, not horizontal, it was much easier to read back then.

Example:
JFK
SFO $200
(TVL) the brackets are in place of the circle we'd actually draw.

Then the flight coupons would only show the JFK-SFO flight, no need for a SFO-TVL coupon, but if the passenger needed some kind of a rewrite on the ticket, the next agent would know what the first agent had done, how the fare had been arrived at.

It has always been important to call and let the airline know if there was ever a flight segment you weren't going to be using, or, as we both know, all onward travel was likely to be cancelled.

There was another, more complicated ticketing trick we used for people who were making the same commute every week, so we could help them take advantage of an excursion fare which required a longer stay or an over weekend stay.

Example: a pax travels every Monday from BOS to DCA, and returns every Friday. If he bought the ticket that way, to travel within the week, he'd pay a higher fare than if he were staying over a weekend. So we'd set him up with two sets of round trip tickets like this: BOS-DCA on the first Monday, showing a return DCA-BOS in the second week. The second ticket would be a DCA-BOS on that first Friday, returning BOS-DCA on the following Monday. Both trips showed a weekend stay, hence a lower fare. The passenger just had to make sure he produced the correct ticket each time.

We mostly loved finding tricks like these to give people cheaper fares.

if he's in the wrong same thing. This country puts 22 year olds in prison for life.

Booking hidden city tickets was strictly prohibited by the company.

Learn something new each day.