Как 22-летний основатель создал Skiplagged и выиграл суд против United Airlines

Zaman signed up for Orbitz's affiliate program through Rakuten LinkShare in the early days but never used it, because the program meant pushing 'book soon' style promo links at his users. Skiplagged redirected to Orbitz without affiliate tags and earned nothing from it.

“Never utilized that account during the time frame it was active beyond just manually exploring what it offered”

Two and a half years after launch, with about a million monthly visitors, the website and apps still made no money; Zaman was pointing to hotel commissions as a future option rather than a live one.

“The website and app don't make money right now, but there are lots of ways Skiplagged as a travel service can in the future”

Off-the-shelf airfare data services did not support searching by stopover, which is the whole point of hidden-city search, so relying on them was a dead end.

“services that provide airfare data make it really difficult to facilitate what Skiplagged does, i.e. search by stopovers”

Both Reddit front-page moments (December 2014 and November 2015) overwhelmed the site: live search went over capacity and returned no or wrong results for hours while thousands of new visitors were trying it for the first time.

“If you're trying to use the site and get no results or the prices seem too high, that's because Skiplagged is over capacity for searches.”

A self-funded side project had no headroom for a sudden traffic spike; in 2015 he pointed people to the mobile apps as a fallback while the website struggled.

Before the lawsuit, explaining hidden-city ticketing to ordinary travelers was slow going; the idea sounds like a scam ('one weird trick airlines don't want you to know').

“You reminded me of how difficult it was to educate consumers. It feels weird, but fortunately the trick is real here.”