[jamesaguilar]

I wonder. Do you sign any agreement that prohibits hidden city routing when you buy the ticket? If so, on an ethical level, it's not the same as the sandwich buying scenario, where you are not signing any additional agreement.

I wonder what I would do if I were the airline. Obviously the simplest thing would be to suspend the return ticket, but I suppose that the return ticket would typically be booked on a different airline. Another option would be to collaborate with other airlines to suspend return tickets, but I suppose that would be collusion and wouldn't fly with regulators. You could also try a prisoner's dilemma-y thing where future sales to a customer that has hidden city-routed in the past are marked up to fix the difference. If all airlines did this then only infrequent flyers would be able to hidden-city route. But if any airline refuses to participate, it might be tough for the business of the airlines that engaged in this practice.

Tough situation for the airlines. Not that I have too much sympathy, but I do take it into perspective that travelling is historically extremely cheap. It's a great time to be a flyer.

[sjwright]

Do you sign any agreement that prohibits only eating one half of a sandwich? Would any such agreement be reasonable if buried in a dense online ordering click-wrap?

[jamesaguilar]

Reasonable . . . hrm. Hard to say. The surface area of duties and rights associated with an airline ticket in particular and airline travel in general are so vast that some level of clickwrap is unavoidable, not to mention the various laws that cover the industry.

Comparatively, the duties and rights regarding a physical good like a sandwich are fairly simple -- it behaves like most simple physical goods. You buy it, then you can do what you want with it. Airline tickets are unlike this in a variety of ways. Hidden city routing being prohibited would not, I feel, be qualitatively different than many of these other restrictions.

[sjwright]

I buy a sandwich; I can eat all of it or some of it.

I buy airplane seats; I can sit in both seats or just one. If they don't like which seats I chose to sit in or not, they shouldn't have sold the ticket to me in the first place.

[jowiar]

They're not really "selling you tickets" on specific flights. They're selling you the service of hauling you from from your starting point to your destination - possibly on the route planned, or possibly on other routes. This includes such things as sending you on another airline, or on a train, or putting you up in a hotel room.

I think the airlines would be willing to ignore a handful of people skipping out on a leg here or there. Pricing is obviously a major issue, but I think even moreso than that, if this were to become a common/well accepted way of buying tickets, there are serious issues in case of cancellations/delays/missed connections that, while fine in the hands of those who know they're subjecting themselves to the risk of being stranded, would lead to a bunch of "I bought a ticket to Chicago and United is going to leave me in Nantucket unless I buy a second ticket" news stories in case of a snowstorm.

[sjwright]

> They're not really "selling you tickets" on specific flights.

They really are.

Coca-cola are marketing a refreshing tasty sparkling beverage, but what they're actually selling is carbonated water with sugar and acid. If I use it to clean my driveway, that's my prerogative, and Coca-cola don't get to retroactively charge me more because driveway cleaning chemicals are a more profitable market.

[SilasX]

Funny that you bring that up, because that's actually happened! (Almost.) It's why alcohol-for-drinking is more expensive than alcohol-for-cleaning.

The government wanted to tax people it they drink it but not if they just clean with it. But then people (well, alcoholics mainly) realized they could buy the untaxed one "for cleaning" but then turn around and drink it. Can't have that!

End result: denatured alcohol, which (given taxes) is cheaper than the drinking kind because they "yuck it up" to the point that you can't drink it.

I just hope they don't do the analogous thing here, which would be like "poison you and hold the antidote at the ticket's final location" :-O

[jamesaguilar]

The problem with analogies is that just because you can make two things sound similar does not mean they are.

The statement you made about airline tickets is normative, not descriptive. I'm curious about how things actually are, not how people on HN want them to be.

[saryant]

Yes, you agree for both the fare rules of the specific ticket you bought and the airline's contract of carriage, both of which are approved by the Department of Transportation. And (at least) the CoC prohibits hidden-city ticketing.

[jamesaguilar]

Thanks! I could not find the contract on JetBlue's site when I went looking last night. But here is the contract for American Airlines.

http://www.aa.com/i18n/customerService/customerCommitment/co...

As you can see, hidden city routing is prohibited, and they retain the right to assess the difference between the ticket you actually used and what you paid if you engage in the practice.