Court documents reveal that Orbitz and the low-fare search website Skiplagged are in settlement negotiations in a lawsuit brought jointly by Orbitz and United Airlines over Skiplagged's service, which is designed to help consumers find, among other things, cheaper but prohibited hidden-city fares.
The legal battle pits Aktarer Zaman, 22, a 2013 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who worked or interned at high-tech companies Amazon and Cisco Systems, against an online travel agency (OTA) and a major airline.
At issue is Zaman's website, which is designed to find a variety of cheap airfares that consumers can then book on Orbitz.
In a complaint filed last November in U.S. District Court in Illinois, Orbitz claimed that Skiplagged had "likely wrongfully obtained" information about Orbitz's application program interface (API) in order to provide consumers with links to hidden-city and other cheap fares on Orbitz.
But Zaman stated in a posting on Gofundme, a website on which he is raising money to cover his legal expenses, "Everything Skiplagged has done and continues to do is legal."
At last count, he had raised more than $66,000 on the site from sympathizers who see the lawsuit as a David vs. Goliath battle.
Zaman is financing Skiplagged himself. He said it does not make money and that his goal is to help consumers become more informed about airfares because he sees travel as "one of the most fulfilling things" people can do.
Zaman's lawyers have also filed a motion against United seeking to dismiss the airline's claims on the grounds that the courts lacks personal jurisdiction over Zaman, who lives in New York. However, they acknowledge that Skiplagged is available to residents of Illinois.
Hidden-city ticketing involves booking a ticket in which the passenger's intended final destination is not the final city on the itinerary, but rather an intermediate or connecting city that has a higher published fare. By booking a ticket to the second city but getting off at the first, travelers sometimes get a cheaper fare.
Airlines prohibit the booking of hidden-city fares because they leave carriers with empty seats they cannot sell and also create "logistical and public safety concerns," according to the complaint.
Orbitz could find itself especially vulnerable to Skiplagged's business model because airlines levy debit memos and sometimes even pull the plates of travel agencies are caught selling hidden-city fares. Many also include language prohibiting the practice in the passenger contracts of carriage.
Orbitz claimed that Skiplagged caused the OTA to breach its contracts with commercial airlines by redirecting users from its search results to a booking window on Orbitz.
The practice of using a hyperlink to a publicly available page on a website, as opposed to a home page, is called deeplinking. Orbitz said it "authorizes a small number of companies to 'deep link' into the Orbitz.com website" and alleged that Skiplagged uses a method akin to deeplinking that "creates the impression that Skiplagged and Orbitz are partners."
Orbitz declined to comment when asked if it had been hit with debit memos as a result of Skiplagged.
Skiplagged became an Orbitz affiliate early in 2013, at which point it agreed not to offer hidden-city ticketing, according to Orbitz, which said it had terminated the affiliate relationship in September.
In the complaint, Orbitz said it had tried to stop Skiplagged from selling hidden-city tickets through Orbitz in a variety of ways. It first ordered Skiplagged to stop, it told the court. It claimed that Skiplagged agreed to but did not comply with that order, and since then, it has not been able to prevent Skiplagged from redirecting its users to Orbitz.
In the complaint, Orbitz said that Zaman uses a redirection scheme that "involves several unique features." Orbitz said that Zaman has developed an algorithm that generates a specific search on Orbitz that will produce only one flight result. Then, the algorithm identifies a unique Orbitz URL to provide the search result for the trip (and fare) the consumer is seeking.
The complaint asserts that Skiplagged redirects users to "Book Now" on Orbitz by using what it calls an "antiquated HTML technique" called meta-refresh that can transfer users to a new page on a different website. These transfers are seamless to the user, according to the complaint, so it looks as though Skiplagged and Orbitz are partners.
The complaint states that Skiplagged has also directed its users to other third-party websites and airline sites.
Orbitz said that it continues to search for ways to detect customers who come to Orbitz from Skiplagged and prevent the hidden-city bookings. But it said it had been frustrated in these efforts by Zaman's varied redirection strategies and use of the meta-refresh technique.
Zaman said last week that his connection to Orbitz is not as tortuous as the OTA is suggesting but that he could not discuss the allegations while the lawsuit is pending.