The problem here is that revenue protection departments catch on to these things, and more quickly if you post about it, or operate a service that abuses or facilitates it.
The service itself is also kind of expensive for the chance that you might be able to get a cheaper flight. I plugged in the data for an upcoming international flight path I need to make soon and the total was $85 for service, which is a bit in my opinion for the chance that the service might be able to find a cheaper flight plan.
And since it's non-refundable unless you can prove there is a cheaper option, it's sunk money if there's nothing significantly better. I'm honestly not sure how much stronger this is than just using the multi-flight tool on ITA Matrix in a lot of cases, especially since the secret is basically they'll hunt for the hidden city flights, which with a small bit of research you can do yourself.
Article says:
...but what if they don't find anything? Fair question. It's possible you've already found the cheapest rate you're going to get. Flystein has a beat-my-price option where you only get charged if Flystein actually saves you more than their fees.
Yep, don't ever book the outbound and return on the same itinerary if you are using this trick. Most airlines ( other than Southwest ) will void everything else on the itinerary once they detect it.
It's also one reason why low-cost carriers like Easyjet and Ryanair have thos low operating costs, they only offer point to point flights so there is no hidden-city option and no need to pay for a department to scan for it...
Since airlines wouldn't be profitable without price discrimination of the sort that makes hidden cities and throwaway tickets possible, they won't just go away, when you post about it.
From the airlines' perspective those fares actually make sense. A direct flight should be more expensive than an indirect one, even if we are talking about the very same flight.
It's not a bug, it's a feature and here to stay...
Hi! Flystein is not yet another meta-search like Kayak or some travel agency.
It is human expert powered service which helps you to save on flights.
Flystein experts use hundreds sites, professional tools and special saving strategies(article just mention only few of them) and are interested only to save as much as possible and make clients happy, so happy clients would recommend Flystein to friends or blog about it ;) For BeatMyPrice trip requests the small fee is paid only when you get real savings, in opposite case the card authorization is promptly removed.
The service works best for any flights which cost more than lets say 500$ total.
For a simple trip just use your favorite metasearch like Kayak first and then submit results to Flystein as Price to Beat. If Flystein experts cant find you the real savings - your request would be completely free and you will be sure you got the best price already.
For more complex trips - go with Build A Trip and save tons of time and money.
Good catch!
The screenshot does not show NYC->SFO link but it is included in calculation as +200 (609+557+577+200 = 1943)
It was addressed in a separate message, nothing special - just a Virgin flight. We usually recommend Virgin and JetBlue for domestic flights if there is no big price difference with other carriers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08subversion-...
and more recently...
http://www.aol.com/article/2014/12/31/united-airlines-suing-...