The Ethics And Legality Of Hidden City And Back To Back Ticketing

I have gotten into a couple shouting matches recently over at FlyerTalk on this subject. For those of you who don’t know, hidden city tickets is when you leave the airport at an intermediate destination, forfeiting at least one leg of your itinerary. Back to Back ticketing is when you plan on visiting a city multiple times, returning home on the weekends. Instead of paying for tickets that do not include a Saturday night stay, you book one flight for the first outbound and the last return, and then other flights home for the weekend originating in your destination with Saturday night stays.

What’s The Problem?

Most airlines have clauses in their contract of carriage saying that you are not allowed to do either one. For example, Delta’s contract of carriage says:

3) Delta specifically prohibits the practices commonly known as:
A) Back to Back Ticketing – The issuance, purchase or usage of flight coupons from two or more tickets issued at round trip fares, or the combination of two or more round trip excursion fares end to end on the same ticket for the purpose of circumventing minimum stay requirements.
B) Throwaway Ticketing – The issuance, purchase or usage of round excursion fares for one way travel.
C) Hidden City/Point Beyond Ticketing – The issuance, purchase or usage of a fare from a point before the passenger’s actual origin or to a point beyond the passenger’s actual destination.

4) Where a ticket is invalidated as the result of the passenger’s non-compliance with
any term or condition of sale, Delta has the right in its sole discretion to:
A) Cancel any remaining portion of the passenger’s itinerary,
B) Confiscate unused flight coupons,
C) Refuse to board the passenger or check the passenger’s baggage, or
D) Assess the passenger for the reasonable remaining value of the ticket, which shall be no less than the difference between the fare actually paid and the lowest fare applicable to the passenger’s actual itinerary.

So basically Delta is saying it “prohibits” these practices and can take specified actions.

Are These Practices Illegal?

No, of course not. American Airlines has even admitted that such practices do not break the law. At worst, an airline can say that you are not complying with the terms of the sale, but so what. As a customer, you are giving the airline money, and they are providing you with a service. The entire basis of these claims of non-compliance have to do with how you consume or fail to consume their service, which I do not believe any airline can enforce, no matter what terms it puts in its contract.

In the case of hidden city ticketing, you are simply not consuming part of the service. It would be like getting a great weekend rate for a hotel, yet not spending the night there on Saturday. I fundamentally believe that you can’t defraud a company by not consuming services you paid for. Delta or any airline can put such clauses in its contract, but I don’t think any court would uphold it.

In the case of back to back ticketing, the claims of fraud rest on the idea that you are not consuming services in the order that the provider would like. Ironically, it would not be against the contract of carriage if the back to back tickets were purchased from multiple carriers or if you took another mode of transportation back to your point of origin over the weekend. Consumers will always make purchases that are in their rational best interest, and I just can’t fathom how it can be fraud to legally purchase and consume services in such a way that it saves you money. You are under no obligation to purchase goods or services in a way to maximize the seller’s revenue, regardless of what someone puts in a contract.

For example, a friend of mine and I used to a cookie pie at the mall. Buying the pie was cheaper than ordering the two or three cookies that we wanted to eat. We would eat half the pie and throw it away. Obviously, we were stupid teenagers with high metabolisms, but I digress. Now I suppose the cookie company could have put some small print on the box saying “This cookie is intended to be consumed in full by a large party. We prohibit customers from purchasing it for the purpose of saving money on smaller cookies. If we find you have been doing this we will attempt to charge you for the price of many individual cookies.”  Such a notice would be laughable, and I think the airline’s case would be similarly laughed out of court. To my knowledge, no airline has ever attempted to enforce this in a court of law, for obvious reasons.

One FlyerTalker Disagrees

There is a certain former airline employee who trolls FlyerTalk who thinks that an airline’s contract offcarriage can essentially compel their customers to do anything and that non-compliance is fraudulent. Once the subject comes up, this persona will respond with an endless barrage of accusations that rational consumer behavior constitutes criminal fraud. I am genuinely confused as to whether this person actually believes his own arguments or is just being an Internet troll.  It is really hard for me to imagine that this person would actually cancel an already booked itinerary, pay a change fee, and then rebook a flight that terminates at a point where the person was originally connecting through. On the other hand, I have met some really strange, right wing, corporate apologists. Some may actually believe that private companies can enforce anything that they can put into a contract and that just about any action can be seen as acceptance of a contract. Of course, as someone who spent a lot of his life surrounded by lawyers, I know that every provision in a contract is not always enforceable.

I personally have found many occasions where airlines have not complied with their own contracts of carriage. I am not saying that two wrongs don’t make a right, but neither am I accusing an airline of fraud. Just as no right is considered absolute, neither is any condition placed in a contract valid and enforceable. To believe otherwise is to imagine we live in a world where corporate power is so complete, that we can be compelled under the force of law to consume goods and service only as those companies specify, and only in such a way to maximize their profits. Only an extremist and misguided ideologue, or an Internet troll, would bother to advocate such a position.