What is ‘skiplagging’ and how can it save me money? Flights ‘trick’ explained – and there’s a catch

Prepare for record air fares, some travel insiders are warning. Two of the main reasons: demand for travel seems irrepressible, with many of us still making up for journeys lost during the Covid pandemic; and problems with aircraft mean that the supply of seats is lower than expected.

Understandably passengers want to save cash – and in the US one controversial trick for finding cheaper tickets is known variously as “skiplagging”, “hidden-city flying” and “throwaway ticketing”.

Skiplagging is a technique to exploit one of the anomalies of air travel – that flying from A via B to C is often cheaper than simply flying from A to B. For example, I flew this week to Kansas City in the US. I paid £735 return for a ticket travelling via Atlanta on Virgin Atlantic and its partner Delta. But were I to be going only as far as Atlanta the fare would typically be £200 more.

The principle of skiplagging is to take advantage of such oddities. You buy a ticket pretending you want to go from A via B to C in order to get a cheap ticket – but then instead of changing planes at the connecting point, you deliberately “no-show” for the onward flight.

The method claims to be able to save hundreds of dollars. But the airlines don’t like it, and claim users are breaching their contract for travel.

These are the key questions and answers.

Why should flying a shorter distance cost you more?

It sounds a bizarre concept: surely more flying should cost more, not less? But there is some method behind the airlines’ apparent madness.

A London-Atlanta nonstop flight is a premium product, for which people are prepared to pay more. In contrast, London-Kansas City requires at least one stop along the way and several different airlines will get you there – I could fly on American Airlines via Chicago, for example, or United via Washington DC.

So to grab a slice of the London-Kansas City market, the airlines have to cut their prices so that the overall flight costs less than the sum of its parts. That same phenomenon plays out thousands of times a day. And it works in Europe and many other parts of the world besides the US.

Presumably there’s a catch or two?

Many. Let’s start with luggage. If you check in baggage for the aircraft hold, it’s normally checked through to your final destination (though oddly not…