Lufthansa Sues the Customer Who Skipped Part of His Return Journey

German Airlines Lufthansa is issuing one customer who apparently for skipping the return ticket journey and aborting the flight at layover destination. Frequent fliers are using the trick named Skipping or Hidden city to get the flights at cheaper rates than paying for the direct flight. The Hidden City trick works by finding the trip that has multiple layovers at the cities where the passenger wants to land. Using this method, the customers book the ticket of one destination and abort their journey on the intermediate layover station.

The customer, in this case, booked the round-trip flight ticket from Oslo to Seattle with the same Hidden city method. The customer has used the same way to book his flight tickets in the past. As he is caught, the company sued him asking to pay $2000 in the differences caused by intermittently aborting the flight and the destination not mentioned in the round-trip ticket. The passenger booked his ticket from Oslo to Seattle with Frankfurt as layover city for 657 Euros. But, instead of flying to Seattle, he deboarded in Frankfurt and flew to Berlin using another ticket from the same Airlines.

The journey was completed on April 8, 2016, and the passenger booked the flight tickets one month before the trip. According to Lufthansa, the customer should have bought the tickets worth 2,769 euros but paid way less than the expected amount. Now, the company is asking for the remuneration for covering the full ticket expenses from the customer worth 2,112 Euros in full settlement. The customer also said in the court that the Terms and Conditions on the website of the company do not mention anything about this method and the case should be dismissed. The court said that Lufthansa’s Terms and Conditions lack transparency and the way the company calculated the airfare for this customer is unfair.