FAQ
Absolutely. Feel free to do some searches yourself. Compare the original cost of the direct flight to a shortcut flight that we found for you and you will see the savings. Many people have used this method already, including the founders of this website!
We’re not sure. But when they do, we will obviously be put out of business. Which is fine.
Yes.
However, airlines don’t like it though, since they are not able to charge you the intended price for a direct flight. According to a New York Times article:
“Most of [the airlines]— the major exception being free-spirited Southwest Airlines — expressly forbid it in their ticketing rules. But those rules don’t carry the force of law, and most travel lawyers say that their recourse is limited. They could probably preclude you from flying with them in the future, but their case for demanding penalties is weak, and the risk of detection is low if you don’t book these kinds of routes more often than a couple of times per carrier per year.” - source
By all means - you can! We’re just hoping to make the process much easier. You also don’t save any more money by doing it yourself, so why give yourself the trouble? On our site, we’ve looked into all the best destination cities that create shortcut flights already, so you don’t have to input over 100 cities, per search, just to find the optimal savings.
We get referral fees from our affiliates, such as Travelocity, for each booking that is made with them by someone that came from our site. So for example, if you searched a shortcut flight on FlyShortcut.com, clicked on the “Book” button, and bought a ticket on Travelocity, Travelocity will pay us. Note that you are not paying any more for your ticket than if you had purchased directly from the airline - our earnings come from our affiliates, not you.
Eventually we would like to venture into selling other products on our website, or even sell advertising space. But we’re not there yet.
We are using the website that ITA Software put up to get our information. ITA Software is a company that was bought by Google, and its software powers many of the search functions of the major airlines in the world (Air Canada, United, Turkish Airlines, etc.). You can find it here: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/.
We are comfortable sharing this because since we don’t charge you as the user, we’re not really concerned that you will use that site to do your search. On FlyShortcut.com, we’ve made it a little easier for you to use it for the purpose of finding a shortcut flight.