U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman.Southern District of Florida. Courtesy photo. U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman.Southern District of Florida. Courtesy photo.

A putative class action lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida that could have affected airlines across the nation has nosedived, succumbing to a summary judgment from U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman over a lack of evidence.

The ruling clarified confusion over whether filling in an online form was akin to entering into a contract with a company.

Named plaintiff Margaret Schultz from Palm Beach County accused Texas-based American Airlines Inc. of using website cookies and algorithms to systematically trick customers into accepting contracts at lower prices, before hiking them up at the last minute. But the court found those allegations didn't stand up to scrutiny.

Schultz's breach of contract lawsuit claimed that at 7 p.m. on May 25, 2017, she found a flight from Washington, D.C., to Miami for $197, but after she clicked "pay now" an error message said the transaction couldn't be processed. Schultz alleged the price shot up to $297 and ultimately became $379, which she paid. The suit claimed that happened because the airline's computer engineers manipulated price data.

"American has ascertained, through millions of observations of millions of flight bookings on its website and other forms of data mining, that once consumers decide on an airline, departure airport, arrival airport, flight time and price level for a specific seat, they will likely pay a higher price for the same seat to avoid stress associated with changing their flight," the complaint said.

But Altman found that testimony from the plaintiff "blatantly contradicted" electronic records from American Airlines that said it had sold its last $197 fare at 3:39 p.m.

Schultz claimed this was the third time this had happened in five months, but didn't have screenshots of related transactions or error messages. Instead, she offered "substantively identical" pages from a dummy transaction that allegedly showed a similar price hike.

Schultz claimed she spent 55 minutes deciding on a ticket, according to Altman's ruling, which said it wasn't enough that she repeatedly insisted under oath that she'd seen the $197 fare at 7 p.m.

The plaintiff didn't dispute the accuracy of those records, and instead claimed the website must have malfunctioned. But that argument didn't fly.

"Schultz, in short, asks this court to accept as true her wholly-uncorroborated, self-serving testimony—even though the thrust of that testimony is, given the objective documentary record, implausible," Altman wrote. "This the court cannot—and will not—do."

Even if there had been a glitch, Altman found that clicking "pay now" was not akin to entering into a binding contract with American Airlines, as it represented the fifth stage of a six-part process — the final part being the "finish" page. After that, American Airlines argued it then has to check whether customers have sufficient funds, take their payment and confirm regulatory authorities had cleared them to fly—none of which happened in Schultz's case.

When a browser click on a flight advertised on American Airlines' website, the system is designed to hold that fare for a 15-minute period, while the potential customer decides whether to accept it.

But Altman stressed this doesn't mean American Airlines offered Schultz a specific fare that she could claim at any point, because an airplane "cannot accommodate every person who might want a seat on a particular flight."

Rather than amounting to a contract, the ruling said the defendant's 15-minute hold was a way of policing abuse while adhering to the laws of supply and demand.

"Without it, a consumer who was not sure whether she would need a particular flight could, months before that flight, fill out AA's online order form to near-completion and then leave the web browser open for weeks (or even months) at a time—until she was ready to pull the proverbial trigger and click  'Pay Now,' " the ruling said. " This cannot be the law."

Plaintiffs attorneys Mason Kerns and Jeremy Block of Mason Kerns Law in Miami and Robert Burkett Jr. of Burkett Law Office in Fort Myers did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

American Airlines has denied any wrongdoing, but declined to comment. Humberto Ocariz of Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Miami and Elizabeth Marks, James Brandt and Michael Bern of Latham & Watkins' New York and Washington, D.C., offices handled its case.

Read the ruling:

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