Leave Aktarer Zaman alone!
Do I need to get my red vlog curtains out again? Has it come to that?
Okay: although sites like Skiplagged.com have been around for a bit, it’s all news to me. Thus, this law suit against the guy (Aktarer Zaman) who created it is too. And it’s ridiculous to the ridiculouseth power. The concept behind Hidden City (if you’ve been in the dark too) is essentially a travel site that helps frequent flyers circumvent the system’s exorbitant costs. But how? By helping you find flights with layovers in the city that you actually want to visit (so you can just hop off there instead). There are catches, obviously – like I can’t check my luggage filled with copious ensemble options for my two day trip (because it’d go on to wherever your ticket’s connecting flight’s headed). And, obviously, you can’t get a round trip ticket, as your return flight would be coming back from wherever the plane went when you decided to play hookie and skip the rest of the trip.
You’d think the demand for this air ferrying loophole might not be great enough to cause massive losses.
But United and Orbitz shared a difference of opinion.
A $75,000 difference of opinion, to be exact.
And so now they wanna sue Zaman because they’ve got a bad case of sandy vagina over the fact that he’s beating airlines at their own game. The worst they can come up with as ammo against him is that it’s “unfair competition” and he’s “promoting prohibited travel”. He denies this, of course, because all he’s really doing is spotlighting some glaring oversights (or “inefficiencies”, as he calls them) with these airlines. And it really did seem inefficient to me, too, as I was initially reading this (“Why isn’t a closer locale the layover’s at cheaper to begin with?”) Because I don’t fly much, I had to keep reading and learn that it’s the same theme you see in any capitalistic story: demand. The more popular a city, the more you’re gonna pay to get there. In the end, my favorite part of this whole story has to be what Mr. Zaman’s making off his page: Nothing. It’s simply a service for people getting chronically screwed by new fees and rising costs. Technically, all the site does is expedite a process fliers could probably do on their own if they really wanted – to see where they can leave their journey prematurely and cheaply.
And you can’t sue someone for pointing out places hidden in “plane” sight.
Right?