So there I was, falling asleep on the last night of my week-long Costa Rican adventure, when I realized I needed to get back to Los Angeles early the next day. My original Southwest Airlines Companion Pass itinerary had me leaving Liberia, Costa Rica (LIR) at 2:00 pm, making a stop in Houston (IAH), then returning to LAX at 11:45 pm. This was a Companion Pass ticket so the price for two people was $390 [total].
The Portal Options:
I immediately combed my go-to booking portals such as Google Flights, thankyou.com, and Delta.com to see if there were any earlier [non-stop] flights that a) I would not pay an arm or a leg for, or b) something I could use points on. It wasn’t looking pretty.
Delta had the flight I wanted: Departing LIR @ 8:00 am arriving at LAX @ 12:00 pm, but the flight was $406.83 one-way, per-person (so $813 total)! The points situation didn’t fare any better: AMEX wanted 81,366 Membership rewards points. Ultimate Rewards and Thank You were comparable to that rate.
The Skiplagged Option:
That left me one final option: Skiplagged. I had used Skiplagged once before on a trip to the Dominican Republic. If I recall correctly, Skiplagged saved me something like $200 off a round-trip flight at that time. Sure enough, I looked up my hoped-for itinerary and found two one-way flights on Delta for $545 total! That’s a savings of $268 — plus I could cancel my Southwest flights and get the cost of the tickets credited back and the taxes and fees refunded to my credit card!
How Skiplagged Works:
If you are unfamiliar with Skiplagged, their business model utilizes a somewhat controversial methodology that exploits a type of ticket in the major airlines booking systems called a “hidden-city ticket”. To illustrate this from the example above, you can see the cost of a flight from LIR to LAX would be $406.83. However, if you look at the way Delta priced this exact same flight as a part of a different itinerary (in this case, LAX-YVR, or more accurately, LIR-LAX-SEA-YVR), this flight was priced at $272.50 each ticket on Skiplagged when part of a booking to Vancouver (a difference in pricing of $134.33 per ticket).
What You Need To Know When Using Skiplagged:
The caveat to using Skiplagged is there are a couple of things you need to be aware of (you will actually get a ‘warning message’ with some of the following before you make your purchase):
- You are purchasing through tickets to the final destination, but you are essentially “hopping off” on the leg that gets you where you want to be before the next flight.
- Because you are “hopping off early”, you should not check your luggage unless you want it checked through to the final destination — so use carry-on luggage only.
- Airlines, for various and obvious reasons, hate this. In fact, United and Orbitz sued them.
- Because of #3, it’s best you don’t give them your frequent flyer # as you likely won’t be credited (or penalized).
- If you do get an itinerary that ‘takes’ you to several different countries, like mine in the example above (Costa Rica – U.S. – Canada), you must make sure you have the appropriate Visas or you may not be allowed to board or fly.
In my case, Skiplagged more than came through in a clutch situation, though it wouldn’t have been possible without Southwest’s cancellation policy. The final result looked like this:
$268 Skiplagged Savings vs. Buying the Tickets Anywhere ElseÂ
+
$113 ‘Profit’ from this change in itinerary to an earlier non-stop flight
 =$381
(With $390 Credit in Refunded Southwest Tickets, Taxes, and Fees)
Cheers!
