Fight or Flight for Entrepreneur Exploiting Hidden Airline Fees [e137]
The guys kick off the week by discussing how an entrepreneur got sued by United and Orbitz for exploiting the hidden city fees in airline tickets. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to our podcast where we cover business legal news and that’s it. We no longer answer your questions. Actually, we do. You can send in your questions and ideas at ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. We are changing our format a little bit and – oh, yeah – my name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: Yeah. So, we are changing our format. We’re getting rid of some of the questions, at least not in every episode. MATT: Yeah, it turns out we answered pretty much every legal question there is. There’s only 136 legal questions – well, more than that because some of those first episodes, I think, had three questions per episode. NASIR: Yeah, exactly. So, we pretty much exhausted that. No, but we just want to focus in on some of these legal issues. I feel like we don’t have enough time to cover some of these topics and so we’re going to just stick to one topic per episode so, that way, we can talk about it fully. Please send us your ideas and continue to send us your questions because we will be covering them, but we’re going to be consolidating into one episode and one topic. MATT: Yeah. So, like the times we get off-track or I get us off-track talking about random things that have nothing to do with the story we’re talking about, now we can afford to do that and still cover the legal side of it. So, everybody wins! NASIR: Exactly. MATT: If you’re tuning in to listen to your legal analysis or my relation to analogies to TV shows or movies then… NASIR: Yeah, exactly. We can talk about The Office more. We can talk about the sauce versus crust debate a little bit more in detail. We have more time. MATT: Speaking of which, I’m going to tell a personal story for our story today because we’re dealing with a lawsuit involving United and Orbitz. So, typically, if I’m looking for flight – unless it’s local – like, in the States then I just pretty much go to Southwest. But, if I’m looking for something outside of the state, I’ll usually go to Orbitz first and see what all the options are and then end up going to the actual airline’s website once I find the flight that works. And so, that’s pertinent to this because there’s this new kid – and he is a kid, he’s 22 years old – that started this site. NASIR: They call it a kid in the media, though. MATT: Skiplagged is the name of it. But, basically, I guess I should tell a little backstory on this. I didn’t even know this existed, this hidden fees thing. So, if I was trying to fly to Denver, sometimes it would be cheaper for me to book San Diego to Denver to another city than it would just to be San Diego to Denver which seems crazy but that’s apparently how it works. So, this guy’s website… NASIR: It seems crazy but it’s true. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Believe it or not. MATT: So, this guy’s site essentially will produce those, show you those flights that exist and then, I guess, get you out of these hidden fees. So, obviously, Orbitz which is, I assume, the biggest online flight searching tool on the internet. I’m assuming it has a pretty sizable chunk of the market. NASIR: Yeah, Orbitz I think is huge. I think they even bought out Hotwire a while ago and Travelocity is probably their competitor and I think KAYAK, I think they actually used Orbitz in part of their search engine and so forth. So, I think all these guys are pretty big, but Orbitz is definitely a huge one and United, of course, is definitely one of the biggest airlines. MATT: Yeah, and that’s who’s suing him – it’s Orbitz and United. So, we’ve got two heavy-hitters going after this 22-year-old kid who apparently doesn’t even have a company which is unfortunate for him. NASIR: Yeah. Well, if you look at the actual lawsuit, he has been sued personally even though he’s operating Skiplagged,