Comment by dopamean
21 hours ago
I'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?
I'll flip this around and say I've never understood why an airline is viewed as a special case. In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses. For example, if I turn up to a hotel I booked only to find that the room isn't available, I'm entitled to sue the hotel for my cost in finding a reasonable last minute replacement. That's the case even if the room wasn't available because it was unsafe for some reason.
Of course nobody is expecting that they "keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings". But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service. The fact that an airline will sometimes fail to get their customers to their destination and will have to compensate them for it, is just the cost of doing business.
Luckily in the UK and the EU your right to compensation for delayed flights is enshrined in law.
In the UK and EU you absolutely do not have the right to be compensated for sales or deals not closed in part due to a delayed flight.
Your entire point is completely at odds to reality. In the general case, contracts do not guarantee there are never problems, and problems happening do not create an automatic entitlement to sue. The entire point of contracts is to protect both parties.
Ultimately, if you are travelling, you are relying on *you* to get yourself there. Airlines and hotels will help, there's compensation available to some degree, but extrapolating that out to "everything is someone else's responsibility and I deserve to be compensated for everything I hoped to achieve" is pure fantasy.
seems OP is not talking about compensation of the deal itself but rather compensation for the actual flight rather than a $100 voucher. Assuming his flight to Brazil was much more than that
3 replies →
This would require airlines underwriting the value of the meetings that you might miss and pricing their services accordingly. I imagine an airline would never sell a flight to CEOs on their way to board meetings, or actors on their way to filming a big budget movie.
You can absolutely find someone willing to sell you insurance on whatever you need for a price, but the airline isn't in the business of insuring the value of your meetings.
> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.
Do you think this is how companies sell things? With uncapped liability?
Do you think AWS reimburses customers for their lost revenue when they have an outage?
Re: AWS.
Yes, you have agreed to SLAs. Credit is issued on your bill if they slip away from the 99% uptime contract.
4 replies →
Airlines are quite a special case. Learned a lot from this a few months ago:
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-airlines-are-always-going-bankru...
I've had plenty of bad airline experiences and wished they gave me more for my trouble, but clearly they are unable to at current margins. If you want the market to provide a better service, it already does: you can pay tons more to fly private, either a charter or your own jet you purchased!
> I've had plenty of bad airline experiences and wished they gave me more for my trouble, but clearly they are unable to at current margins.
It's weird to see people simp for the airline industry. A cursory google search shows that United Airlines, to take one example, made $4,300,000,000 in profits before taxes last year. This is money that could easily be spent on things like better maintenance, more pilots and crew, and other expenditures that would make flights less apt to be delayed or canceled. Instead it goes to shareholders and executives.
https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...
4 replies →
> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.
This generally only applies to direct losses, though. If Amazon ships you a defective Bic pen, and it leaves you unable to sign a time-critical $1B contract, Amazon is only liable for the cost of the Bic pen - not the resulting $1B loss.
You might be able to sue for the cost of obtaining a replacement pen, but anything beyond that isn't going to happen without some kind of bespoke SLA.
There are exceptional cases, detrimental to both you and the company. Company already swallowed a pretty serious loss, in that case arguably common sense is to let it go, sometimes sh*t happens.
I think that's exactly the case you would insure yourself against as an airline, so when shit hits the fan, you will not collapse.
3 replies →
If they truly were exceptional that would be fine. But long delays happen a lot, and I am sure there are things airlines could do to improve that like maintain the planes better so they aren't grounded as often and having backup planes so that if one has problems they can put customers on a different one.
4 replies →
I believe the contract you enter into is that the airline will get you to your destination safely. I don't believe there's any special case there.
FWIW I think we should have the same laws in the US that you all have in the UK and EU.
I don’t think airlines are a special case? They should compensate you for cancelled flights, delays etc, which sounds like they did. What you seem to be asking for is compensation for… actually I’m not sure what. What is the value of the missed meeting they should compensate?
If you take a taxi to a meeting and the taxi broke down so you missed some important meeting, should the taxi driver / company compensate you for that too? Or do they just refund you the fare, or pay for a different taxi?
You must never read the contracts you enter into. Nearly every contract limits the liability of the service provider to the amount you paid them. Short of proving fraud or negligence, you're not going to get more than that.
That seems fair. Presumably a flight from Rio to the US cost significantly more than $100.
My understanding is that there is no arrival time SLA when you buy a plane ticket (barring the compensation ladder set by EU regulators). All they owe you is getting you and your stuff to the destination.
> But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service.
By this logic, should I be able to sue Brooks Brothers for lost earnings if I split my pants in the middle of a sales pitch? Goodyear if I blow a tire on the way to a job interview? Taco Bell if I crap my pants in the middle of Jeopardy?
You are basically arguing that travelers with little to lose from a delay should subsidize travelers with a lot to lose, they would pay the same ticket prize but end up with different payouts.
I don't think that's reasonable. If you have a lot to lose then extra insurance should be a premium offering.
I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free
I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
For starters, they could have offered more than $100 to OP here
I travel all the time. I've missed or been late to all sorts of events because of delayed, canceled, and diverted flights over the years. It's the nature of air travel. It's an extremely dynamic environment that is not in the complete control of the pilot or or the airline. To have the attitude that the company personally owes you because of something like that is, imo, ridiculous. I understand that there are extreme cases where the airline screws up and in those cases you should receive compensation. I once sat on the tarmac at JFK for 4 hours and JetBlue offered me a measly $50 voucher. A plane having mechanical trouble over the Amazon rainforest, diverting safely to a large and safe city, then getting put up in a hotel room for the night does not count as an extreme case of the airline screwing up.
Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel. They promise to get you to your destination. They don't like engine problems and the domino effect that has on their routing any more than you do. Saying this as someone with over a million miles flown, I've seen the worst sides of airlines. But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.
> They promise to get you to your destination.
Critically they promise "by a certain time" as well. Surely with so many miles you are aware of the "significant disruption to my travel plans" aspect to getting compensated for a service that they failed to deliver.
Plane crews timing out on the tarmac at midnight forcing everyone aboard to lose a day of travel is not a "sob story" it is a systemic and purposeful optimization on the airline's part, a gamble that they can put up enough customer service phone menus and hoops that they only have to comp a small portion of customers whose time and money they've misappropriated.
ETA: my example above is to point out that even in the common failure cases airlines are awful, and as OP shares, even worse in the rare engine failure case. Yeah, they don't directly control that the engine failed (unless we start talking about how lack of maintenance and overworked mechanics contribute to that, which we should, and is under their control btw) but a hundred bucks for being stranded in the jungle is an insult no matter how you slice it
3 replies →
>Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel.
That's a strawman of the request, not the request. The request is that, same as anything else in a proper Free Market, the price includes all costs and internalizes all direct risks. I'm paying $XYZ to be delivered from point A to point B on a given date with a ~roughly given time. I don't expect there to never ever be trouble, that's life. I do expect them to take care of all trouble however, as I am in their care. If they create a need for a hotel stay, then they should pay for that. If they lose luggage, they should pay for that. If they have to reroute, put me on another mode of transportation, or whatever, that should all be their problem. And if they can't deliver reasonably appropriate service they should partially or fully refund the purchase.
This is critical to a functioning market. If Airlines Alpha & Beta both have a incident rate of 0.5% but Airline Omega has an incident rate of 4%, what should happen is Omega has to compete or go out of business vs the other two (and then someone new comes in and gets the assets to try a different approach). Maybe they save enough money over that they can offer lower prices anyway, or have high enough quality or unique offerings elsewhere to charge a higher price, or accept even lower margins, or some combo. But what cannot be allowed is for them to externalize that onto the public, because then the prices are fraudulent and no longer comparable between competitors. The market can't respond if the pricing signal gets muted. Unsurprisingly lots of players would love to be able to advertise a lower price not through actually earning a lower price but just socializing costs, but that's not ok.
>But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.
Horse baloney, margins have nothing to do with this. Every airlines can and should be held to the same standard, so it's just a universal cost same as jet fuel. They're all in the same boat so long as they perform the same. If some airlines have much higher failure rates then others, then yeah they're going to have to address that somehow and that's exactly how it should be! Normal adult businesses deal with this via prevention, insurance and buffers, it's simply a cost of doing honest business.
4 replies →
The airlines are certainly bad actors, the problem on the other side is there are a massive number of people that are willing to waste massive amounts of time to get undeserved freebies if the boundary is too permissive. I agree with your underlying sentiment that the needle is too strongly on the side of the airlines at the moment, but I think if they shifted towards a more healthy stance they'd quickly be swamped by these abusers.
I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.
>I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
It's actually pretty simple to understand how I offer them grace, it's because they're terrible businesses with terrible financials. Airlines run on brutally thin margins, barely 5% in the best of years and usually closer to 1-3% in average years, and frequently wipe themselves out, as Spirit did here. They generally make less than 10 USD in profit per customer.
Because I don't want to pay an extra 100 USD for a marginally nicer experience, and w neither does anyone else. I want the cheapest possible way to be thrown through the air across an ocean. I'm not going to fault them for acting like assholes when I pay them like an asshole.
You could have bought travel insurance. Just like you do with expensive packages in shipping. If your business meetings were critical, you should have insured the trip for an amount that offsets or covers the cost.
These situations are regulated in Europe.
But then corporates go brainwashing on tv that too much regulations are killing business.
You can have rights or ease of business, nailing both, sounds difficult.
Also cost. I mean you can charter a plane if you want better QoS than what the airline provides (maybe). It'll just cost you a lot of money. Heck you can charter two redundant planes to fly together so the second one can pick you up if the first runs into issues.
The pilot did the right thing, the company didn't.
I think that in the EU, compensation for such an event is at least 600€, plus all expenses paid (including meals, hotel, etc...). The airline most likely offered $100 as an attempt to settle for way less than what they legally owe.
Without further information, we can't really blame the company for the incident itself, and they may have had no other option regarding what happened in Manaus, but they definitely had the option of offering proper compensation instead of threats.
Agreed. Before I had finished reading, I honestly thought you declined the $100 because everything ended up alright, you got to see some dolphins, and have a cool story to tell.
Same. I really thought that was going to be the next sentence. Was honestly shocked when I kept reading. Such a strange attitude.
I only get mad when an airline temporarily misplaced my luggage.
1 reply →
I read the main objection as being with an airline exploring option to put a traveler on a no-fly list. Not due to anything related to security, but purely as a punishment for exploring compensation options. This, in my book, is VERY bad and and deserves public shaming of the airline, complaints to regulators, etc. etc.
Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.
Read his comment again. He says he rejected the $100 and then started arguing and threatening to go to court. That's when they started exploring banning him from the airline.
> Read his comment again. He says he rejected the $100 and then started arguing and threatening to go to court.
Going to court is the standard, and usually the only, path for resolving disagreements that parties cannot easily resolve between themselves. Retaliating by putting the passenger on a no fly list deserves public shaming and pushback.
For example, a major grocery store can put people on a "do not come here again" list. But this is an easy way for a big business to hurt a person and should not be used for minor issues. I might see this "the business bans whoever it wants for any reason" as a legitimate defense, but not in a regulated business with high barrier to entry.
Yeah I don't get what the airline did wrong there.
They failed to uphold their end of the contract and caused OP to experience damages.
Poor op. /s
This is the kind of attitude that puts pressure on airlines and thus pilots to fly even when situation is dubious.
4 replies →
This has nothing to do with OPs point though. Their point is about the data that was harvested and sold.
They are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen. Or if it does have better recovery.
Don't skimp on maintenance, make sure you have planes that can do divert in time.
If there was engine troubles in the middle of the ocean would it still be okay?
When something like this happens, at the very least you should get the full cost of your ticket back, plus reimbursement for lodging and food, at least. Then maybe airlines would have more of an incentive to maintain their fleet better, and have backup planes so this kind of thing doesn't happen very often.
I don't think you understood his comment. The emergency landing was not necessarily the problem; it was everything the airline did to remediate that after the fact.
I think you’re failing to identify the important part of the story.
Also wondering why you'd fly Spirit from Brazil to the US.
Parent commenter never said it was Spirit. (I kind of doubt that they ever operated in Brazil.) Just that this is the kind of data they would be worried about being sold.
Do proper maintenance so they don’t have engine issues, and carry insurance to compensate passengers in case they do?
There is no amount of maintenance that can avoid all mechanical issues. Take bird strikes, for example.
Regarding "carry insurance": margins in the airline business are notoriously slim. They compete very heavily on cost, because the service they provide is a commodity (or close to it). Most airlines will probably not willingly add any extra costs that they don't have to, because that would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors.
For those passengers who are willing to pay extra to be reimbursed for delays or other inconveniences, there may be travel insurance that can provide that.
Op clearly wasn’t mad at the pilot for doing their job. Op is mad at the company for trying to downplay the situation with $100.
Insane bruv
I hate some airline polices as much as anyone, and it is absolutely terrible to loose a meeting, family reunion, cruise ship vacation, etc. for something like this, but it is way worse to die. If airlines compensated with whatever money you think you deserve, the tickets would cost way more than they already are. Shit happens. You are not entitled to compensation for everything shitty that happens in the world.
> You are not entitled to compensation for everything shitty that happens in the world.
This is true, but not relevant here?
If you pay for a service, and you don't get that service, are you implying that you should just be SOL?
If the plane has an issue, and the pilot rightfully lands it for safety concerns, but the paying passengers don't get where they are going, that sounds like the airline's problem to me, not the passengers' problem.
At the very minimum the passenger should be refunded for their ticket, because they didn't get what they paid for.
There are already too many negative consequences in the world of commercial transactions that the end-consumer gets saddled with simply because they don't have the leverage, money or time to fight for redress.
Uhm, properly compensate passengers that have concrete harm to point to instead of offering a laughable alibi payment? What I'll never understand is why some neoliberal schools of thought defend conglomerates like they're their children... This company has enough money to compensate for fuck-ups, at least it should have. Every insurance on the planet can do the simple math involved for this risk assesment.
Agree, isn't this precisely what credit-card companies promise to cover? I'd think I would just claim flight-interruption with the credit card insurance and it should cover all expenses.
[dead]
[dead]
A decent reimbursement.
Not parents fault the airline flies around with defective hardware.
Usually this is regulated by law.
Perhaps they want the airlines to do a better job maintaining their fleet such that the airline is capable of meeting its obligations with respect to arriving on time without crashing.
This is an unfair take. Airlines already take maintenance very seriously. Knock them for their customer service all you want, but engineering doesn't deserve it.