An American Airlines passenger got called out for throwaway ticketing, or what some people call ‘Skiplagging’ (I hate this name tbh).

They checked in at the ticket counter and showed their ID. The agent saw that it was an ID issued in the state they were connecting in – suggesting they might be stopping their journey there. The agent said they suspected the passenger planned to skip the final flight segment and warned them they would be banned from American Airlines if they did not take the connection.

And – in fact – they were doing this! They explained they were a ‘poor college student’ trying to get home. And now they didn’t know what to do. Do they tell an agent in their connecting city they felt sick? Just leave the airport and risk the ban?

Their first flight landed late, and they could easily have missed their connection! But that flight delayed. They eventually decided just to leave the airport, figuring that a ban from American Airlines was actually ok.

Throwaway ticketing is a practice that’s gone on for many decades. Airlines often charge more money for non-stops than they do for connecting itineraries. So people book a flight with a connection through the city they want to travel to, and just don’t take that second connecting flight. As a result, they can often save money.

For instance, you:

• Want to fly DC to Chicago, but it’s cheaper to book DC to Chicago to Milwaukee – so you buy that, and only use the first segment to Chicago.
  
• Want to fly DC to Phoenix, but it’s cheaper to fly DC to Phoenix to Tucson – so you buy that, and only use the first segment to Phoenix.

It’s not illegal. It violates airline rules. It’s not unethical according to the New York Times ‘Ethicist’. But there are risks.

• Re-routing during irregular operations. If your flight is delayed or cancelled, your airline may want to re-route you through a different hub than the city you actually wanted to fly to (and get off in).

  Maybe your connection would go through Denver instead of Chicago – and you wouldn’t be able to get off in the city you’d planned to! I’ve never had a problem asking to be kept on my original routing during irregular operations, but it may not be automatic.

• No checked bags. Airlines don’t generally allow you to ‘short-check’ bags, where they only send your luggage to your connecting city, although there are exceptions. If you book DC to Chicago to Milwaukee, and you get off in Chicago, you don’t want your luggage sent to Milwaukee (and your bags can fly without you).

• Gate checking bags. If you aren’t among the first to board your flight, overhead bins may be full (or employees might fear that the bins are filling up) and you might be required to gate check your carry-on bag instead of bringing it onto the aircraft.

  Then your carry on will go to your final ticketed destination, not the city you’re flying to. Now, you might talk your way out of it (try having a story ready – like that you are connecting on a separate ticket to another airline, especially one that the carrier doesn’t interline with) or if they’re collecting bags on the jet bridge instead of at the gate you might get away with bringing your bag on anyway but this is a real risk.

• Can only book one-way. If you book a roundtrip, and throw away a segment on your outbound, the rest of your itinerary will get cancelled by the airline. And sometimes roundtrips are still cheaper, so there are tradeoffs. You might need to book that DC – Chicago – Milwaukee and then a one-way back to DC on the return (potentially with a throwaway segment beyond DC as well).

• Does the airline catch you? As a one-off there’s historically little risk to this. Doing it a lot could catch an airline’s attention. There have even been stories of airlines meeting passengers at the airport over their ticketing practices. United Airlines threatened to trash the credit of customers who skip flights by sending them to collections. Lufthansa sued a passenger over it.

  An airline could shut down your frequent flyer account or even ban you from flying them in the future. It’s something to consider occasionally, not something to do every week. If you’re going to do throwaway ticketing, consider at least crediting miles to a partner airline frequent flyer account, though that may not protect you, but why make it easy for them to track you?

When you’re doing something against the rules, it’s a good idea to involve as few people in the transaction as possible. Why not use the airline’s mobile app? Or check in at a kiosk? Why put eyes on your reservation? They wouldn’t even have had to show their drivers license! (Incidentally, American asks you what your state of residence is when booking tickets from them online, I suppose they could run data with this but as I understand it the reason for the question has to do with the insurance products they sell during checkout.)

We don’t know whether an agent flagging that someone’s ID matches the state of their connecting city would actually mean putting eyes back on the reservation later to see if all segments were flown. Agents can report their suspicions, which should trigger a follow up. Then again, we don’t know if the agent actually even submitted this!

Though sometimes an agent’s suspicions are elevated further – like the teenager taken to a security room and interrogated over their throwaway ticket (they confessed). They’ve also been confronting passengers at the airport over suspected ‘ticketing abuse’ and billing them although there the ban only applies if the customer doesn’t pay.