“Skiplagging” — or booking a flight with a layover to skip the last leg of travel — is a common hack for travelers who don’t want to pay for a direct flight or who to save money on airfare to a connecting destination. Airlines contend the practice results in lost revenue for seats on planes.
I like how their reasoning is that someone could’ve used that empty seat for an actual emergency, or losing a luggage. Lol
They already got their money. They want even more money.
Won’t someone think of the shareholders please?
If there were an emergency, and the seat was empty just before door seal… Why wouldn’t they put the emergency person in it? Having someone there who needed to travel would be a problem, having no one is not.
That’s basically standby travel. Which is a thing for irregular operations (storms and such for missed flights) and someone trying to get on a same-day earlier flight, but generally you can’t book yourself as a standby passenger on a full flight from the get-go. So the flight wouldn’t even show up as an option when you search for it.
I had thought that overbooking was standard practice in the industry these days?
It is, but it’s actually done pretty well that they usually don’t need to pull anyone off the plane. They also reduce how much they overbook by as departure time comes closer
Yeah pretending to care about the empty seat is totally ridiculous, they just know it sounds bad to say ‘we wanted more money from people for the first leg even though we can obviously still make enough profit to cover a whole extra flight and give a discount large enough to make all the extra hassel worthwhile for enough people that it’s worth addressing’