Class Action: American Airlines Manipulates Flight Prices Using Cookies, Online Browsing Histories

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer

American Airlines is the defendant in a proposed class action lawsuit recently removed to Florida federal court. At the center of the plaintiff’s complaint is an alleged “bait-and-switch” scheme through which American Airlines supposedly utilizes Internet “cookies” to manipulate the prices of plane tickets based on consumers’ browsing histories. Browsing histories, the lawsuit claims, enable American Airlines to learn which consumers will pay a higher price for airfare.

The timeline in the case starts in May 2017, when American Airlines supposedly listed the price for a flight from Washington D.C. to Miami at “a clear and unmistakable” $197. According to the suit, the plaintiff, upon seeing the offer, entered into the defendant’s website all required information—biographical details, payment information, etc.—to accept the price of the plane ticket. The plaintiff completed all steps necessary to purchase the plane ticket except one—hitting the “Pay now” button on AA.com, the case says, arguing that the plaintiff’s actions to this point were enough to create the reasonable expectation that she would enter into the consumer-retailer contract offered by American Airlines:

“As [the plaintiff] centered her computer cursor on the ‘Pay now’ button—the clicking of which was, per American's own indication, the only task remaining to fully accept American's clearly delineated offer, American had created a reasonable expectation in [the plaintiff], as an objectively reasonable consumer, that American had a willingness to enter into a contract with [the plaintiff] pursuant to the terms annunciated above." 

When the plaintiff did finally hit the “Pay now” button, however, the $197 price changed, according to the lawsuit:

“On May 25th, after American refused to honor its contract with [the plaintiff] regarding the $197 DCA-MIA flight, it raised the price to $297.

Though upset at American's contractual breach, [the plaintiff], left with no choice and in a manner substantially identical to her purchase of the $197 ticket, decided to purchase the $297 ticket.”

And then, the lawsuit goes on, it happened again: 

“After she did so, American again failed to perform, breaching the contract regarding the $297 ticket in substantially the identical manner in which it breached the contract regarding the $197 ticket. When [the plaintiff] clicked ‘Pay now’ and paid American $297 via the same process and payment method as the $197 ticket, American refused to provide the promised services, returned the $297 payment, and claimed the ticket price was now $379.”

This scenario is the alleged product of a “systematic and purposeful” effort by American Airlines to “dishonestly lure” in customers “with contracts it knows it cannot honor,” the lawsuit says. In truth, American Airlines’ data mining efforts have afforded the company a way to goad consumers into paying higher prices for the same seats to “avoid the stress associated with changing their flight,” according to the suit. The plaintiff argues American Airlines wields a web cache system that it knows full well does not update seat inventory in real time.

The lawsuit goes so far as to allege American Airlines knew at all materially relevant times that the aforementioned ticket prices would be displayed until the consumer hit the “Pay now” button.