Hidden City Trip aka getting off on layover

It is against airlines terms and conditions which you agree to when you purchase ticket. Risks: irregular operations cause the airline to reroute you on another flight that goes to New York, but not to Atlanta, the airline decides to charge you for real route taken (rare). Downside: an entire airplane of people will be inconvenienced as the airline searches for you at gate for Atlanta to New York leg.

Taken from an article about hidden city trips-bottom line is you are making life difficult for people who may want to go from JFK to Atlanta and can't get a seat because you booked a ticket there. And the other passengers might be delayed because they are waiting for you to board-I was on a flight that did this and I'm sure the passenger skipped out.

Although finding flights for less seems like a huge gain for you,
hidden city ticketing poses financial threats and other hardships to
consumers in the long run. Flyers who need to go to the actual
intended destination of the ticket will find that the cost of their
tickets is rising due to minimal seat availability.

Hidden city ticketers use these seats part of the way, leaving other
consumers either flightless or having to shell out more money to get
where they need to go. Over time, this behavior will also cause a rise
in the cost of all fares due to the loss of money from seats going
empty thanks to flyers who book hidden city flights and get off at the
layover destinations.

Just book yourself a flight to JFK and be done with it science you have booked a flight from JFK to ATL. You are making things way more complicated than need be.

You already know the answer because you used the exact name for this arbitrage in your title of the post (a simple Google search of hidden city ticketing would take no more than a few seconds). Next time consider not buying one-way tickets to Europe unless you are sure you have a budget carrier backup at an affordable price.

If there is a flight change or cancellation, the Airline would get you to JFK, and is not obligated to fly you through Atlanta. You might end up with an expensive one way ticket at the last moment from JFK to Atlanta!

The problem with international hidden city ticketing and clearing immigration at ATL is that you don't know if you come in at E concourse or F concourse. If you arrive at F concourse, you're fine- you pick your bag up at arrival, do the ICE formalities, and can exit to the city right from there.

But if your flight comes into E concourse, there is no direct exit there. You collect your bag at ICE, then you have to go back through the airside area in order to catch your connecting flight or exit to the city which involves giving your bag bag to the airline (presumably Delta) to send to a landside baggage carousel and in order for them to do this, it has to be properly tagged with ATL as your final destination.

Thanks for the responses, they were mostly helpful! I pretty much knew the answer but was hoping maybe someone had figured out a trick. And to answer someone’s question, I would not be booking one way trips to Europe. The tickets I am looking at our RT from JFK to Europe and RT from ATL to JFK. I just happened to see that one of the returns stopped in ATL and it irked me because that’s my final destination. I wish there was a way to notify the airlines and they be cool with it, but then they’d make less of my $. Oh well.

Some posts were edited or removed per Community Guideline #8.