Stephen M. Keller/Southwest Airlines
- Southwest Airlines in a court filing sought info about Kiwi.com's relationship with Skiplagged.
- The move was a "distraction," a Kiwi.com spokesperson said.
- Southwest said the two sites broke its terms of service by displaying fares.
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Kiwi.com said Southwest Airline's legal maneuvering to get more info about the flight-search website was a "distraction."
It comes after Southwest sued Kiwi.com and Skiplagged in federal court in Texas, saying both sites broke the airline's website's terms of service by displaying its flights.
The airline said the two sites were working cooperatively, sending traffic to each other, and adding extra fees. The airline filed a motion seeking additional information about the relationship between Kiwi.com and Skiplagged.
Kiwi.com in a court filing said Southwest's proposal for extra information gathering would "cause undue delay" but not provide any information that would help Southwest's lawsuit.
"Adding information that is not new to Southwest, more than three months after all the motions have been filed, confirms the sense of panic emanating from Southwest," a Kiwi.com spokesperson told Insider on Friday. "This is just a distraction – the focus should be on whether a company like Southwest can publish information openly on the internet and then sue for accessing the same date."
A Southwest spokesperson declined to comment on a pending lawsuit.
"Neither Skiplagged nor Kiwi is authorized to display Southwest fares or sell Southwest flights," the airline's lawyers wrote in its complaint.
The airline has said in court documents and letters that Skiplagged sends traffic to Kiwi.com to purchase Southwest fares, including "hidden city" fares.
In a filing on Thursday, Kiwi.com included a brief timeline of its relationship with both Skiplagged and Southwest. Skiplagged began sending traffic to Kiwi.com in 2016, the filing said. In November 2016, traffic from Skiplagged to Kiwi.com resulted in a Southwest purchase for the first time. Traffic flowing from Skiplagged to Kiwi.com to Southwest grew through 2018, before "stabilizing" in 2019, the filing said.
Kiwi.com said it had "brokered some hidden-city flights where the traffic source was Skiplagged.com."
"At Kiwi.com we just wish to gather all the available information for consumers about the best available routes and fares without the threat of legal action," a Kiwi.com spokesperson said.
Skiplagged had filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in New York, its home state, asking a judge to rule on whether it had broken Southwest's terms. Southwest then filed a lawsuit against Skiplagged in Texas.