Skiplagged Plays Whac-A-Mole With Southwest Flights
Skift Take
As the saying goes, you can run but you can't hide. Skiplagged may be marketing Southwest flights for now and helping flyers book them, but this practice doesn't have a bright future.
Dennis' Online Travel Briefing
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, Executive Editor and online travel rockstar Dennis Schaal will bring readers exclusive reporting and insight into the business of online travel and digital booking, and how this sector has an impact across the travel industry.Give flight discounter and hidden-city ticket enabler Skiplagged credit for its resourcefulness when it comes to offering verboten flights from Southwest Airlines, but the nine-year-old startup could be playing a dangerous game.
Skiplagged had been using Kiwi.com to access flights from Southwest, which notoriously touts Southwest.com as the only place for leisure travelers to book its tickets. But with a Southwest hometown federal court in Dallas barring Kiwi from scraping Southwest and settlement talks between the airline and Kiwi under way, Skiplagged is still earning money promoting Southwest flights.
Skiplagged now enables its customers to find Southwest flights on Skiplagged.com, and then points flyers to DestinaHolidays to book them. Does DestinaHolidays scrape the Southwest website to access the flights or grab them as part of tour packages? Both methods would presumably be unauthorized. Efforts to reach DestinaHolidays for comment were unsuccessful.
So Skiplagged, founded by Aktarer Zaman in New York, seems to be staying one step ahead of the airline, which has won multiple lawsuits and issued a torrent of cease and desist letters against startups and other online tra
