The case of ”Hidden City-Tickets”: Consumer behavior and impact on balancing power in contractual relations

So-called hidden-city tickets are an airline ticket pricing phenomenon. It takes place when a travel itinerary including a connecting flight at an intermediate city is less expensive than a ticket from the origin to the final destination. In this scenario, passengers traveling to the intermediate city will have the incentive to pretend to be traveling to the final destination, only to deplane at the connection point and pass up the remaining leg of the ticketed itinerary. Hidden-city opportunities are common today. In this paper, starting from a recent hidden-city ticket case, the analysis offers a comparative look at German and Italian consumer law systems.