Comment by jbstack
20 hours ago
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
Why should the entire flight be compensated? The airline provided the flight, just 24 hours later (and the delay is what the $100 are supposed to compensate).
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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.
Yes, but they do not compensate you based on your lost revenue, they compensate you based on how much you spent with them. The best you can get from them is a refund.
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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...
This was a fantastic year for United, and the margin is ~6%! They lost a similar amount in 2020. The earnings history definitely backs up the story of relatively low margins, weak growth and a fair amount of volatility to deal with.
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Wow! Simp?! What a word. A wrong word, though. So very, very wrong.
Would you prefer I spend some time telling my personal horror stories? Or should I point out that while a meaningful minority of those profits have recently been going to buybacks (a billion or less) which do benefit shareholders and executives to some degree (although a lot of executive compensation is already paid before we're looking at net profits), most of those are going to the needs of the airline which operates in a very capital-intensive industry. They have do do things like, y'know, BUY AIRPLANES. A bit pricier than those MacBooks a typical SaaS is purchasing. Apparently, after the industry was deregulated, it made it very difficult to keep some routes stable, and the article calls into question whether you can actually have a free market ever reach equilibrium or if the strange nature of this particular industry will always be pushing one of the players towards bankruptcy.
Of course, you only performed a cursory look. Perhaps if you had put in a little effort, you'd realize you didn't just singlehandedly fix the airline industry!
That link I shared was not some random, cursory look at the biz. I felt I learned a lot from it. I'm not able to verify whether the conclusions are accurate, but if they are, it sounds like the business has some pretty unusual problems, and where to go from here is not at all clear.
> 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.
Its kinda strange to have to insure yourself against an airline, when generally we insure ourselves against acts of nature and accidents and thieves.
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How do you get an insurance for lost profits due to not making a meeting as an individual?
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.
I'm with you on the delays, especially since it's one sided, company doesn't loose anything, main inconvenicence is to the user so the company has to be incentivised to be on time (it may be even beneficial for the airport, since passengers would buy more overpriced stuff from waiting area).
I was referring to the case when an engine went bad and company had to use intermediate airport and accomodate all users for the night. Also you wouldn't want to punish company hard for admiting technical issues, since that might cause them to underreport and create dangerous situations.
Like back-up planes at every airport?
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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.