"It claims the website improperly acts as a middleman, "inserting itself between American [Airlines] and flight consumers", and promises to deliver savings, but often charges consumers more than if they had booked a ticket directly with the airline or an authorised agent."
Authorised agent? What does that mean? As far as I know, all the flight search engines use the ITA matrix service (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/). Are they saying that's not a legitimate business? My point is, how is skiplagged different than the other search engines other than offering the hidden city ticketing option?
I didn’t read the whole pdf, but it sounds like they’re saying Skiplagged pretends to be the the user and goes to aa.com on their behalf and purchases the tickets ? Personally I haven’t used the skiplagged website, but wondering why it would do that vs just outputting you an itinerary like “Here, book this itinerary with whichever booking agent you want”
Now I’m wondering if when they say “promises to deliver savings, but often charges consumers more than if they had booked a ticket directly with the airline”, they mean booking the skiplagged ticket via their website vs skiplagged, and not vs price of direct flight…
Btw you also can’t book anything with ita matrix, that’s only a search engine. After finding an itinerary you need to take the fare construction code and provide that to an iata accredited agency who can then input the booking into the GDS.
But yeah screw the airlines here. And the irony of them claiming skiplagged has “deceptive ticketing practices” They should figure out their pricing models if they’re unhappy people are exploiting their game.
So, honestly, that's kinda not cool from Skiplagged. They're basically charging you an extra $34.90 which goes to them, even though you can buy the exact same ticket on AA.com with minimal effort, but the checkout page doesn't show that.
I get that whoever made Skiplagged wants to profit out of it, but it does feel a little bit dishonest. I dislike subscriptions, but I think a per-month subscription access to their search-engine would "feel" better here, at least for me.
Authorised agent? What does that mean? As far as I know, all the flight search engines use the ITA matrix service (https://matrix.itasoftware.com/). Are they saying that's not a legitimate business? My point is, how is skiplagged different than the other search engines other than offering the hidden city ticketing option?