Two flights changed entrepreneur Aktarer Zaman‘s life. “One was when I was five years old, and my family was able to fly to the US from Bangladesh, creating a whole new opportunity for us. I saw how important access to travel was,” he told Entrepreneur. “And two: when I was 20 and had gotten a job at Amazon, and saw that flights to Seattle that had layovers in San Francisco were half the price.”
Zaman’s realization led to the creation of Skiplagged, a travel platform that takes advantage of “hidden city tickets,” which means buying a ticket where the layover is actually your desired destination, and then you just don’t take the second leg of the flight.
Skiplagged has gotten the attention of fliers and airlines alike. It is used to book more than a million trips a year, and has also faced lawsuits from United Airlines and American Airlines who say the service violates their terms of service.
Despite the legal pushback, Zaman has continued charging ahead. We spoke with the founder to get his insights on testing disruptive ideas, dealing with legal obstacles, and identifying models that address consumers’ immediate needs.
Please give the elevator pitch of the business and a little bit about your background.
Skiplagged enables travelers to find the best deals on flights, hotels and rental cars — even the ones other sites are afraid to show you. Airlines don’t price based on distance, they price based on how much they can maximize profits for each market. While we have lots of flight and hotel hacks to get consumers the best deals, we are most well known for showing layovers at your final destination, often at significant savings. These are called “hidden city tickets,” or “skiplagging.” Flight prices spike in the last few weeks before travel, and so this is where we really unlock value for travelers. More than half of flights on Skiplagged are within a week of booking. We generate more than $1 billion in ticket sales for airlines per year.
What is skiplagging exactly?
Skiplagging is the practice of finding a better deal on a flight with a layover at your destination than the cost of a direct flight, and then not taking the second leg. People booking on our platform save 47% on average (or $180), and this is all because they have visibility into the best prices. Hidden City ticketing has been around for decades, I was just the first one to build a product that makes it easy for consumers to see all of their options across different dates and departure and arrival airports. Skiplagging is totally legal, and the risk is lower than your flight getting canceled — 99.8% of Skiplagged users have flown without any issues.
Related: How to Successfully Disrupt Your Industry in 6 Steps
What is your advice to entrepreneurs looking to disrupt an industry?
Put the customer first, and you do this by finding market inefficiencies, and be willing to bring solutions to market that aren’t always the most profitable. Look for a pattern that doesn’t make sense. Make sure that your solution can evolve — the algorithm behind Skiplagged is designed to see and understand data in real time. It can see how and when the airline is updating the flights.
Another key to disrupting an industry: unlock a solution that even though the big players may not like, they can’t be endlessly outspoken against because it’s clearly in the interest of the consumer. Look for an idea that the public will consistently be supportive of on message boards, in comments, on Reddit. We’ve grown our user base primarily through word of mouth because it’s one of those products that feels like an “insider secret” so you want to tell others. The Reddit conversation about us is one about how we are supporting travelers.
How do you guard yourself from potential legal action from industry leaders?
You can’t prevent legal action. It actually comes with the territory of great, disruptive ideas, but the key is to create a company and a premise that you’re willing to back to the end. Skiplagged didn’t create the loophole—it simply found a way to automate finding hidden-city tickets using publicly available airfare data. Since airline pricing strategies create these price gaps, Skiplagged is able to expose them without directly violating airline contracts.
Related: How He Used AI to Make $70,000 in a Weekend
Tell us about your latest lawsuit with American.
We’ve just wrapped a huge trial where American sought to stop Skiplagged from publishing hidden city fares and American failed. The conventional wisdom would have been to back down — that there was too much risk going to trial with such a huge company — but I knew that no rules were being broken and that we are here to help people. And it was fascinating to watch my intuition play out. One of American’s complaints was that Skiplagged was engaged in unfair competition, but they voluntarily dismissed the claim of unfair competition right before trial. And then there were four claims asserted by American Airlines, and Skiplagged was found not liable on three of them. The fourth claim was about copyright infringement, related to Skiplagged’s displaying the AA flight symbol logo to identify American flights for consumers on Skiplagged’s website. But we can still use the name American Airlines for listings.
What is your advice for someone who has a great tech idea, but lacks the skillset to actually create it?
If you’re looking for someone to help realize the tech side of your idea, find someone who loves working with data and trying to find patterns. While you may not understand the vernacular, the key is that you want someone who is as passionate about solving the puzzle of your idea as you are. Find someone who wants to improve people’s lives with their code — this should be the motivation, beyond money. I started the company at 20, and I am now 32, and we are profitable and have more than a million customers per year – and yet there is nothing I’d rather do than keep coding and scaling, because every time I hear from a customer about the positive impact we’ve had, I want more.
Related: What Is the Best Airline in the World? New Rankings.
Do you have any advice about testing an idea before investing time/money/resources?
To save you lots of needless time, try to find other industries where your idea didn’t work to disprove your premise. In my case, I was trying to find a precedent in other industries that matched the idea that you had to take both legs of a flight, but I couldn’t find any other industries where you were barred from buying a product and not finishing the whole thing. When you buy a bag of chips, you’re allowed to only eat half. When you book a hotel, you’re fine to only stay part of the booking. If you’re showing more options or choices than your competitors, find out why they aren’t showing those options. Are you willing to take less profit than they are? Are you okay with providing more transparency for the life of your company? Are you competing with competitors, or with the consumer? You always want to be on the side of the consumer, in the short term and long term. From where I grew up, I realized that taking risks was the only way to accomplish something big. But I believed in the risk and realized that the risk was actually just that no one had tried it before.
