That analogy doesn’t really work unless the new peeler is somehow a component of the old peeler, and they sue you if remove the part of the old peeler that makes it inferior.
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The German law you mention is similar in U.S. contract law as well. So we would need to see the TOS to determine if it is too complicated.
have a go at it
I would guess that’s not what the defendant is arguing. More likely it’s on the account of it being too one-sided.
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I did say “rough” analogy. My point is simply why the airlines charge more for something that costs them less to sell.
Hidden city ticketing can save a fortune, btw. I once needed to go from NYC to Houston. A nonstop flight on Continental would have been $1900 roundtrip because EWR-IAH was a hub-to-hub monopoly route for CO. But CO had a partnership with Amtrak where you could buy a ticket from ZFV (aka Philadelphia 30th Street Amtrak station) to IAH via EWR (with ZFV-EWR being a codeshare segment operated by an Amtrak train, and EWR-IAH being the exact same nonstop CO flight that I wanted to take) for only $190 roundtrip. The best part was that this was back when Amtrak still had unreserved trains between NYC and Philly, so I kept the train tickets and used them for a separate trip from NYC to Philly a couple months later.
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That’s a product substitution example, which is a poor fit. This is a bundling vs individual item scenario.
They’re selling SEA-FRA at one price, and SEA-FRA-OSL a bundle of SEA-FRA combined with FRA-OSL for different prices. There is no SEA-OSL product at all. While they may be competing with other ways of bundling SEA-XXX, XXX-OSL that’s driving the bundle price down. It’s questionable if they can force you to use the entire bundle instead of only part of it.
Now, having said that, there may be things the come with the bundle that create issues when not used completely. For instance, they’re transporting a person and their checked luggage. Having luggage still on the second part of the trip and not the person creates issues. Even if they make you pay separately for the luggage transport, it’s still transported as a companion service to the personal transport and not as cargo. If this is what occurred, and they had increased costs by having to react to the person no longer being there and only the luggage, that might be a valid reason. I would assume that didn’t happen here, or with others that skip a leg on purpose.
If the contract wasn’t negotiated between equal parties who could both make adjustments to it, contracting away rights or other questionable terms are suspect. They would need to be tested in court, as this suit may do.
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Similar thing with UK trains. UK train fares are (I understand) the highest in Europe, but you can make things cheaper by buying an advance ticket, in which case you have to take this train with this operator leaving at this time, and no other. But because fares are based on demand (rather than a simple price per mile/km), an advance single between BigCityA and BigCityB might cost £50, while an advance single between BigCityA and Bestiality-on-the-Wold (which is another 5 minutes further down the line past BigCityB) might only cost £30. “Hah!” you think. “If I buy an advance single from BigCityA to Bestiality-on-the-Wold, but get off at BigCityB, I can save myself £20!” Not if ticket inspectors at BigCityB catch you: you could be forced to pay for a full, open single from BigCityA to BigCityB (which may run into three figures) with no discount for the ticket you’ve already bought, and/or fined, and/or, in extremis, criminally prosecuted.
Yes, it’s barmy.
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If you base your argument on misstating the statement you’re responding to, you’re wasting both our time and your own.
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You can put anything in the TOS/EULA but that doesn’t mean it’s the law.
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What you’re not buying into is the idea that you can enter into a contract and be sued for violating its terms. We’ll entertain your Whole Foods example, but you have to add the part where they don’t let you into the store until you sign a contract. (With blood, probably. Those fuckers. Blood oranges, at least.)
Oh, you know Jeff Bezos will sue you. Though I’m glad to see him go after the National Enquirer. Give 'em each a pillowcase full of horseshit and lock 'em in a room, I say.
Wait, what were we talking about?
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you can put whatever you want into a contract, but it’s not necessarily enforceable. this is a basic concept in contract law. real life is not the simpsons episode where bart sells his soul
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This case is annoying because we naturally think the price of a thing should bear some relationship to what it costs to provide it. It obviously costs Lufthansa more to fly Seattle to Frankfurt to Oslo than to do just the first leg.
But of course price has nothing to do with what the thing cost the seller. The market determines the price. If it cost the seller much less, then he makes a nice profit. If it cost him more, he stops making the offer. That’s why airfares work the way they do, and it’s why there’s such a thing as a hidden city fare.
As a consumer, and a person who doesn’t own any airlines, I hope the hidden city fare continues to be a viable exploit. Nevertheless, I won’t pretend not to understand the idea of a market, or of a contract.
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Yes, that’s the crux of this case: whether this provision of the contract is enforceable. I certainly hope it isn’t, and that Lufthansa loses. My comment was a response to somebody who was trying to pretend there was no such agreement between the parties.
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The EU is much more harsh on mouseprint gotchas and strongly, strongly protects the right to travel freely. Especially Germany. I can’t see this being upheld.
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As the folks on this thread who’ve worked in travel have commented, yes, it’s not only quite enforceable but has been enforced by many airlines for many years by penalizing passengers (typically by cancelling return tickets) when it’s discovered. Since it’s part of their TOS, you’re tacitly agreeing to it when purchasing a ticket.
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That still makes no sense. They are still losing one “non-stop” seat from SEA-FRA when they book someone SEA-FRA-OSL. Logically, they must price SEA-FRA-OSL higher than just SEA-FRA if they can fill SEA-FRA with non-stoppers.
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Or, you could look at it this way:
The passenger in question clearly wanted to fly from Oslo to Seattle then return to Frankfurt. On most airlines, booking that kind of flight is a PITA, and often costs significantly more than a full round trip. Sometimes, double the round trip.
So instead of letting the airlines gouge them for an unconventional itinerary, he just refused to play their game. Is the proper fare one that takes you to a destination you didn’t want to go to? Or one where you are penalized for not utilizing part of the service (as Carla pointed out)?
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Also, hidden city ticketing only works on one-way or the return portion of your round trip itinerary. Most airline reservation systems will automatically cancel all downstream legs if you skip a segment along the way.
I’ve done this several times in my flying career. Often with international transpac flights that connected at my hometown airport on the return. Would take a cheap one way positioning flight to somewhere like EWR to start my HKG trip then hop off at DEN on the way back instead of doing the full HKG-SFO-DEN-EWR.
Never got in trouble for it and never had an issue (except once when my flight got cancelled and they tried to put me on the direct flight instead. Had to make up a story about meeting a colleague).
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They’ve clearly done a calculation that they CAN’T fill all the seats with people paying the nonstop fare. And their revenue control system lets them optimize the number of people paying the highest margin fares, while making that excess capacity available for people paying lower-margin (but still profitable in most cases) fares.
For a GREATLY simplified example, let’s say it costs $500/seat to fly a plane SEA-FRA, and $100/seat to fly a plane from FRA-OSL. They might set two inventory buckets, Q and W, with Q costing $1000/seat for SEA-FRA and $200/seat for FRA-OSL, and W costing $600/seat for SEA-FRA and $150/seat for FRA-OSL.
They might make all of the coach seats available to people paying Q fares, but only 20% of the seats available to people paying W fares. The W fares that they publish will also have more restrictions to try to weed out high-paying business travelers (only available with a roundtrip routing, longer advance purchase requirements, maybe a Saturday night stay requirement). And they might not publish any W fares at all for the SEA-FRA route, since they don’t need to be as competitive with pricing there.
As a result, when you go to book SEA-FRA for an itinerary that meets all the requirements (roundtrip, advance purchase, etc.), you’ll get that $1000 Q fare, while you’ll get a $750 ($600+$150) W fare for SEA-FRA-OSL. Both are profitable for the airline, but they’re able to capture a much higher margin from the passenger choosing the monopoly-ish SEA-FRA route vs. the passenger who has a choice of several airlines for SEA-OSL. And if too many people start buying the cheaper W fares, the W fare bucket will sell out and only the more-expensive Q fares will be available even for SEA-OSL (SEA-OSL will now be $1200), so they don’t worry that higher-paying SEA-FRA customers’ seats will all get taken by low-paying SEA-OSL customers.
Again, this is hugely simplified, but it’s the gist of how this works.
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I am sorry, but there is absolutely no logic in the reasoning you cited here. One of the issues with smart people is that they try to look at the other side’s point of view - to a fault. In this case, you are trying to find logic in something that just doesn’t make any sense. If one wants to get off in Frankfurt because there is shit to do in Frankfurt (unlike Oslo), then one should be allowed to do so. He paid for the damn ticket. What he does or doesn’t do with the seat he paid for is his damn business. If I hop on a bus from NYC to LA (if there is one) and have to change buses in Chicago, upon arrival I realized that Chicago is damn awesome and infinitely more interesting than LA and I choose to stay in Chicago, should I pay a penalty for not boarding my bus? What if the guy who didn’t board the plane to Oslo fell ill and couldn’t go? Or didn’t but faked falling ill? Who is going to decide then whether or not he was truly ill - some sort of commission or a court? Fuck Lufthansa - the case will be thrown out of court cuz unlike our courts, German are actually sane. Had I known about this shit, I would’ve made sure that my April trip to Europe with Lufthansa is done through Skiplagged - even if it had cost me more money.
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And you’ve beautifully summed up why people hate airlines. Talk about an industry that has inverted the customer-vendor relationship to such a degree that unfathomable pricing systems and horrible, sometimes violent customer service are the norm. My head, it is shaking.
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