A trip to Latin America in 2017
Booking a skiplagging trip
Before I get on to the ticket, I might need to explain why I needed to do a trip like this. At the time I was doing the software training for a company and a colleague of mine did the hardware training. We had a client in Argentina and another in Mexico who both needed the full suite of training. The idea was for me to fly to Mexico to do 2 days of software training, then fly to Argentina to do 2 days with them. My colleague was going to do the reverse, he’d do 2 days in Argentina then fly up to Mexico to do 2days. So, the clients both got 4 days of training and my colleague and I would not see each other at all during the trip.
I needed to book flights from London to Mexico City, then to Buenos Aires and back home again. It made sense to book the outbound and the final return as an open jaw ticket, then find the middle flight as a separate booking. To book it all as one booking would have been prohibitively expensive.
I booked the main outbound and returned legs with British Airways, flying entirely in premium economy, as an open jaw ticket from London. An open jaw ticket is when you fly out to one location but fly back home again from a different location, as long as you’re going out in one direction and back from a vaguely similar part of the world in the other direction then it works like a return ticket. I’ve covered more about open jaw tickets in other articles, read them here.
With that part sorted I needed to then find my flight from Mexico City to Buenos Aires. There was a direct flight, but it was horrifically expensive, and it wasn’t flying on a One World airline, which didn’t help with my points. So, I started looking at other options, including things like flying with American Airlines into America than down towards Buenos Aries. At the time Latam was part of One World and a major airline in Latin America. They had a route from Mexico that connected through their hub in Santiago. That route was better priced in economy but still quite expensive in any other cabin. But the flight from Mexico to Santiago was at 9-hour overnight flight and I really didn’t want to do that in economy if I could avoid it. I then did what I normally do in Europe and started looking at flying from other starting points or to different finishing points to see what came up. In the end I found a flight to Cordoba, the route being Mexico, Santiago, Buenos Aries and then finally Cordoba. This particular route was being offered in business class for less than the direct flight in economy. This could have been what’s known as error pricing where the algorithm isn’t quite set up right to certain destinations or it could have just been a route they were trying to promote. The problem of course is the final destination was not where I wanted to end up, but I had a plan. I was going to try skip lagging.
What is skip lagging?
Skip lagging is when you book a flight with a stopover or change on route, and then get out at that stopover point, without taking the last flight.
For example, I looked up a price for a flight from New York to Lisbon, in business class, it cost £2600 flying direct on TAP airlines. I then looked at New York to Hamburg on the same date, it was the same flight to Lisbon, then a second flight to Hamburg, it cost £2000. To skip lag that I would book the cheaper flight, then get out at Lisbon, skipping the flight to Hamburg. Probably easy to do as I would have to go through passport control and collect my bags to enter the Schengen area, before checking back in for the Hamburg flight. And that was just one quick example I found.
Why do it?
It’s often cheaper, as my examples have shown.
What’s wrong with doing it?
First of all, it’s a big risk if you have bags to check in. Your bags might go without you, or more likely you’ll cause a lot of fuss when they realise you’re not on the second flight and they have to remove your bags. This could result in you being in trouble with the airline.
Second, airlines don’t like you doing it, it messes up their bookings and you’re taking up a seat that someone else could use. Not to mention the lost revenue from you playing the system.
Many airlines now charge for a no show or fine you if they work out you are skip lagging. Or worse, I’ve heard rumours of people being banned from airlines who repeatedly do this.
Let’s be clear about one thing, skip lagging does not work in reverse. By that I mean if you want to start your route halfway through the booked flight. For example, if I found it was cheaper to book a ticket from Dublin to New York going via London, (which it quite often is), you can’t just show up for the London to New York flight without doing the Dublin flight first. If you have a series of flights booked on one ticket and you don’t take the first flight, most airlines will quite often cancel you off all the rest.
My skip lagging booking
I’d booked under one single ticket a route that took me on three flights, a long-haul trip from Mexico down to Satiago, then a 2 hour flight over to Buenos Aires and a final domestic flight up to Cordoba.
Given the risks of skip lagging, what was my plan?
Well, there’s one trick here that does help you get away with the skip lagging idea, the last flight was a domestic flight within Argentina. This meant that when I arrived in Buenos Aires I would have to enter the country via passport control and collect my bags to take them through customs to get into the country. If I was intending on carrying on for my final flight, I would have had to re-check my bags back in again. This of course gave me an opportunity to leave without doing that, which was my plan. However, I did have a Plan B, if all went wrong and I had to take the final flight I had checked and there were plenty of low-cost flights from Cordoba back to Buenos Aries. Even if I did have to do that, the overall cost was still a cheaper than flying direct or in business class without the extra flight. I decided the risk was worth it and I booked my flight to see what happens.
The flights, did I get away with it?
The first flight to Mexico with British Airways was pretty uneventful, a straightforward flight in premium economy over to Mexico City.
Then it came for my risky skip lagging flight. I checked in online and to my surprise I was only given the boarding passes for the first 2 legs and not my third leg, which I didn’t intend to take. So I headed on board and started the route
I have to say this trip was one of the most memorable flights in business class. By today’s standards the seat was not anything special, but this was nearly ten years ago and the seats were in a 2-2-2 configuration. There was a big screen, and I remember distinctly on this particular 787 they didn’t have overhead bins down the centre aisle, only at the sides. There was also a station for the crew in the middle of the business class area, which was not full height, meaning nothing reached up to the roof. It did give the cabin a huge sense of space, something I’ve never felt before on a plane. The seat itself was huge, had a massive screen and was very comfortable for a good night’s sleep. The service was also excellent, and I very much enjoyed the food. It was quite a while ago, but I still remember that being a very enjoyable flight. The next morning, I awoke in Santiago and headed to the Latam lounge to wait for my flight across to Buenos Aires. Again, no indication of anything to do with checking in to my final flight so I just carried on. The next flight was on an A320 and again I remember it being a particularly great flight, as we flew over the Andes and then into Argentina, I think my face was glued to the window all the way, it was spectacular scenery. As this was a smaller flight, I don’t think we came into a major terminal, I remember us being bussed in and standing in a queue outside to get through passport control. Once through passport control we were directed straight to the baggage belt and I collected my bag, at which point I found myself outside. I felt no need to go and check in for my next flight, so I just grabbed a taxi and headed to my hotel.
There were no further repercussions of me doing this in this instance, they didn’t even contact me to find out if I was going to show up for my last flight. I headed to my hotel and had a great few days in Buenos Aires.
The final flight home with British Airways was also quite memorable, but not for good reasons. I do remember the boarding process being quite unusual, they had set up 2 long queue lines. As the gate was positioned in the corner of the building, they had one line going down one wall and another line going down another wall at 90° to it. Right in the middle where these 2 lines met at the gate they had put up a very small queue saying first class and priority boarding. I noticed this had the small green symbol of One World Emerald status. At the time I had gold status with BA, which meant One World Emerald, nobody was standing there so I headed up to that queue and asked if I could board through there. I don’t think there were any first-class passengers on this flight as they seemed quite surprised when I walked up to them, but they checked my boarding pass and said yes, you should come through here, and I was the first person on the plane. It went downhill from there. First of all, the plane was not clean, there were crumbs in the cup holders and around the seat, it had clearly not being cleaned in the turnaround, or at least not properly. I’d picked the back row of premium economy deliberately so I could recline my seat for most of the flight, as it was an overnight flight. But this was one of the older 777ER’s in BA’s fleet and it was fitted with very old in flight entertainment screens. The screen was not much bigger than my current iPhone is today, and the resolution was terrible, the touch sensitivity was awful and it was not great for watching films on. Especially given this was, at the time, the longest flight BA operated at well over 13 hours to get back to London. I remember not being particularly impressed by the service and with the IFE being terrible, it was not the best flight ever. I think I complained when I got home and got a pile of Avios points as compensation. I’m sure today that flight would be a lot more pleasant with the club suite.
Bottom line
On this occasion I got away with skip lagging, but in recent years airlines have become much more aware of people doing it and take measures to prevent it.
Would I do it again?
Probably not with an airline I want to fly with regularly, I was happy to take the risk with Latam because my chances of using them again in the future was quite slim, so if I did get into trouble, or even worse get banned, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I was fully prepared to take the last flight over to Cordoba and fly back if I had to, but they seemed to make no effort to try and make me do it.
No, I would not recommend trying skip lagging, the chance of it going wrong or backfiring on you is very high and I’d suggest there are other ways to save money when flying.
