United Airlines sues 22-year-old who found method for buying cheaper plane tickets

At the end of the day, airlines are private companies, not state controlled utilities. The airlines can and do set rules about who can access and/or scrape data off their websites. They can set rules about ticket purchases. They can set whatever rules they want.

If they decide that they don't want this guy scraping their websites to actuate his little trick, then thats just too bad for him. Personally, I think what he is doing is cool, but I do recognise that he has no legal right to be doing it. Its up to the airlines if they want to allow it, nor not.

Although I don't know why they are suing him, they could just configure their websites firewalls to disallow his website to scrape the required data. Problem solved.

There's a simple explanation for this behavior. The airlines have a complete spectrum of customers ranging from people who have their tickets paid for by their employer and can write it off against tax or as a business expense (sales teams, executives, marketing, government workers) to the private ticket buyer who is taking their family on holiday or visiting relatives.

This naturally leads to several outcomes; at some times, there are more people wanting to fly at a particular time than there are seats, and there are times where there are more seats than there are people. The airlines then try and fix the problem by raising ticket prices during peak times so that there is less demand. That helps to rebalance demand by getting passengers to spend their money according to priority. Another tactic is to make early bookings cheaper than later bookings. Holidaymakers can plan months in advance while business people might need to only book several days in advance. . However some companies with frequent travellers used to get around this by booking a ticket pool in advance, and selling them off if they weren't used.

The other problem is that airlines also know that people living in some areas are more financially well off than others, so they adjust ticket prices accordingly. So a middle-class family living close to an international airport is going to be charged more than someone living in a small commuter suburb. By doing this, they can maximize profits while basing ticket prices on an ability-to-pay. That naturally leads to people looking at ways of avoiding this pricing.

a reply to: stormcell

And nowadays with Internet they see your IP, and dynamically raise prices the longer you surf around.
The whole travel business is corrupted this way.

Why do you consider it to be corrupt?

The definition of 'corrupt' is 'dishonest', well one of the definitions. But they aren't exactly being dishonest. They are exploiting business psychology. They know you want/need their ticket, and given that they have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize profit, its only reasonable to assume they are going to try and maximize the price they can sell said ticket for. It might be unfair, but since the ticket is theirs to sell for whatever price they can sell it for, its not dishonest.

Dishonest would be selling it you for price $x but charging your card $x+100, which would also be illegal.

They tell you the price they want for the ticket, and as long as that price does not alter during the purchase phase, they are doing nothing 'wrong' per-se. Altering the price during the browsing phase, based on perceived demand, is normal business model, albeit a little unfair.