Airline sues 22-year-old who Figured out how to get cheaper tickets legally

Yahoo! News
Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00 UTC

A young entrepreneur from New York has some enemies in the airline industry. Aktarer Zaman has a website that helps people find cheap airline tickets, but now he's facing a lawsuit.

Source:Tribune

Comment: Sued cheap-flights site owner: 'It's not illegal'

Zaman founded Skiplagged.com last year as a side project and runs the site alone. It uses a strategy known as "hidden city" to allow a user to book a ticket with a layover in the flyer's actual destination, and the user just skips the last leg of the trip.

He said there is nothing illegal about the strategy and noted that it has been around for a long time. He says he doesn't think it is "ethical for big corporations to suppress this knowledge that is publicly accessible" to consumers. The site does not generate any profit.

United Airlines and Orbitz claim "unfair competition."
...
Zaman explained that "travelers do not break the law when they miss all of their flights so why would it be illegal to miss one leg of a flight?"

Read this article for analysis on the lawsuit.

On the whole, the lawsuit really is ridiculous. Suing this guy for showing accurate information about flight prices seems tremendously questionable. However, the situation is complicated somewhat by Zaman's promises to both companies. No matter what, it's well known that airlines play really obnoxious fare-pricing games, and Zaman was trying to shed some light on it with a simple side project. And, really, if your entire business can supposedly be undermined by a 22-year-old kid in his spare time accurately showing the prices of various flights, perhaps the real problem is with your business model, and not with the kid.