A young entrepreneur says he won’t “bow down to corporate pressure” and will fight a lawsuit seeking to stop his website from helping travellers find cheaper airfares via a controversial practice known as “hidden city” ticketing.

Travel-booking website Orbitz and United Airlines have teamed up to file a civil lawsuit against Skiplagged.com and its 22-year-old founder, Aktarer Zaman.

The companies allege that Skiplagged and Zaman are “intentionally and maliciously” interfering with their business by “promoting prohibited forms of travel,” including “hidden city” fares.

Using Skiplagged, a customer can enter departure and arrival cities, and the site will find the cheapest airfare via a so-called “hidden city” ticket. This typically means that when a passenger wants to travel from city A to city B, it will be cheaper to book a flight to city C, with city B as a layover stop. The traveller, however, simply stays in city B and never travels on to city C.

Hidden city fares can be up to 50 per cent cheaper, Zaman told CTV’s Canada AM in an interview from New York.

While hidden city ticketing is not illegal, many airlines have banned the practice and booking services, such as Orbitz, do not promote purchasing airfares in this way.

Because Skiplagged links to United and Orbitz so travellers can book their flights, the companies say the site is “attempting to confuse and mislead the public into believing that his website, and the ‘hidden city’ ticketing it employs, is done with the approval (if not the outright authorization and sponsorship) of Orbitz and the airlines.”

Zaman says his site merely helps travellers save money on airfare by “exposing pricing inefficiencies, among other things,” noting that he is not doing anything illegal.

“All I’m doing is I’m taking publicly accessible information and presenting it in a very interesting way. This is something that consumers can do on their own,” Zaman told Canada AM.

“I don’t think anything that I’m doing is illegal in any way. That’s why this is, after all, a civil case.”

Zaman said his site typically receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. However, that number has jumped to 1 million on some days in the wake of the media attention about the lawsuit.

While he vows to fight the suit and will not shut down his site, Zaman launched a crowdfunding campaign on gofundme.com to help with his legal fees. As of Monday morning, he had raked in nearly $57,000 in donations. His fundraising goal is $60,000.

He is also spreading the word about his legal fight on Reddit.

“I’m going to make sure I don’t bow down to corporate pressure,” Zaman said. “I don’t think that would be a good precedent.”