The observation that became Skiplagged is the kind most people notice, shrug at, and forget.
Aktarer Zaman was twenty and working at Amazon when he noticed that a flight connecting through a city could cost less than a flight to that city. Airlines do not price by distance. They price by route, by competition, by what a given market will bear — which means the leg you actually want is sometimes cheapest when it is buried inside a journey you do not.
He built a search engine that found those itineraries. That was 2013. He has been in and out of federal court more or less ever since.
Bangladesh, then a very specific idea about access
Zaman has described two moments as the origin of the company, and only one of them is about airfare.
“One was when I was five years old, and my family was able to fly to the US from Bangladesh, creating a whole new opportunity for us,” he told Entrepreneur in March 2025. “I saw how important access to travel was.”
The second was the fare anomaly itself. Put together, they explain a company that is unusually moralistic about a very technical trick. Zaman’s framing has never been “here is an arbitrage.” It is closer to: the pricing information already exists, the airlines simply do not surface it, and consumers are entitled to see it.
His own description of the product is characteristically pointed: “Skiplagged enables travelers to find the best deals on flights, hotels and rental cars — even the ones other sites are afraid to show you.”
Lawsuit one: United and Orbitz
Airlines dislike hidden-city ticketing because a passenger who abandons the final leg breaks the assumptions the fare was built on. It is prohibited under most carriers’ contracts of carriage. Whether it is unlawful is a different question, and the last twelve years have been an extended attempt to answer it.
United Airlines and Orbitz sued Zaman in November 2014. He was 22. Orbitz settled separately in February 2015. On May 1, 2015, Judge John Blakey of the Northern District of Illinois dismissed United’s case for lack of jurisdiction — neither Zaman nor Skiplagged had operations in Illinois. By then Zaman had raised $79,000 from strangers on a crowdfunding page to pay his lawyers.
His reaction, given to the International Business Times that day, was less triumphant than relieved: it “is definitely a victory. It is pretty amazing … the court just shut them off.”
Southwest sued in 2021. That one also settled out of court.
Lawsuit three: American Airlines, and a $9.4 million verdict
American Airlines filed in 2023 in the Northern District of Texas, before Judge Mark T. Pittman, and this time it went the distance.
American’s theory of harm, as its attorney Paul Yetter put it to jurors, was about the appearance of authorization: “No one would buy a ticket on a website if they didn’t think the website was authorized to sell tickets.”
The verdict, returned in Fort Worth on October 15, 2024, split. The jury awarded American $9.4 million — $4.7 million in actual damages for copyright infringement, plus $4.7 million in disgorgement of Skiplagged’s revenues. On the trademark claim, American got nothing: Judge Pittman had found Skiplagged’s use of the airline’s marks to be nominative fair use, and the jury awarded no damages on it.
That is a genuinely mixed result dressed as a rout. The number that made headlines is real. So is the finding that a site can name an airline it is not authorized by.
The part that says the most about the founder
Eight days after the verdict, Skift reported what Skiplagged had actually changed: it had stopped using American’s flight symbol — the copyrighted element — and was still selling American Airlines tickets, still using the airline’s name. Skift’s Dennis Schaal noted the case would likely be appealed and “could drag on for years unless there is a settlement,” and reported that Skiplagged was operating on more than $20 million in annual revenue with Zaman still CEO. No appellate ruling had been reported as of this writing.
Zaman’s own account of why he did not settle before trial is the clearest statement of the company’s posture on record: “The conventional wisdom would have been to back down — that there was too much risk going to trial with such a huge company — but I knew that no rules were being broken and that we are here to help people.”
Note what that sentence claims and what it does not. It is his belief about his own conduct, and a jury has since found copyright infringement. Both things are true at once, and a founder profile that flattens them into one is not telling you anything useful.
The business underneath the litigation
The numbers Zaman gives for the business are his own, offered to Entrepreneur in 2025 rather than audited by anyone:
- More than one million trips booked annually.
- More than $1 billion in annual ticket sales generated for airlines — the argument that he is a distribution channel, not a leak.
- Users “save 47% on average (or $180),” per Zaman.
- “Skiplagging is totally legal, and the risk is lower than your flight getting canceled — 99.8% of Skiplagged users have flown without any issues,” he said.
Take those as the company’s claims, which is what they are. The independently verifiable part is the litigation record: sued three times by major carriers, settled twice, beaten once on jurisdiction, hit with a $9.4 million copyright judgment, and still open for business selling the plaintiff’s tickets.
The remarkable thing
Most bootstrapped consumer products die of indifference. Skiplagged has the opposite problem — an industry that has now spent more than a decade and considerable legal budget trying to make one man’s search engine stop existing, without managing it.
Zaman’s stated reason has not moved in twelve years, and it is the same one he gave for the five-year-old on a plane out of Dhaka: “I saw how important access to travel was.” Whether you read that as principle or positioning, he has been remarkably expensive to disagree with.
Related founders
- Eric Baker Was Fired From StubHub. He Bought It Back. — another founder in a legally contested resale market, from the other side of the table.
- Six Months, $80 Million: How Maor Shlomo Built Base44 Alone — the tidy version of the solo-founder story, with none of the litigation.
- Tope Awotona Bet His Life Savings on Calendly — another founder who arrived in the US as a child and built the tool he personally wanted.
Zaman’s arrival from Bangladesh at age five, his time at Amazon, founding Skiplagged at 20, his age of 32 as of March 2025, and all his quotes about access to travel, the product, the decision to go to trial, average savings, the 99.8% figure and the “totally legal” claim are per Entrepreneur (Dan Bova, March 19, 2025); the trip and ticket-sales volumes in that piece are Zaman’s own figures, not independently audited. The November 2014 United and Orbitz suits, the February 2015 Orbitz settlement, Judge John Blakey’s May 1, 2015 dismissal for lack of jurisdiction, Zaman’s age of 22 at the time, the $79,000 raised for his defense and his quote about the ruling are per the International Business Times (Ismat Sarah Mangla, May 1, 2015). The 2021 Southwest suit and its out-of-court settlement are per the Wikipedia entry on Skiplagged, which is flagged here as a weaker source than the rest and is the only claim in this piece resting on it. The October 15, 2024 jury verdict, the $4.7 million / $4.7 million split, the nominative-fair-use finding, Judge Mark T. Pittman, case number 4:23-cv-00860 in the Northern District of Texas, and Paul Yetter’s quote to jurors are per The Texas Lawbook (Bruce Tomaso, October 15, 2024) and FlyerTalk (Joe Cortez, October 17, 2024). Skiplagged’s continued sale of American tickets after the verdict, the removal of American’s flight symbol, the $20 million-plus revenue figure and the quote about the case dragging on are per Skift (Dennis Schaal, October 23, 2024). Reports that both sides later appealed to the Fifth Circuit were not confirmed against a primary source for this piece and are therefore not asserted.
