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
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).
Because the customer purchased a flight on a specific date, which was not delivered.
If you book a hotel room for 1-7 August to visit a conference, would you be okay if they said "oopsie, it'll be available for you 10-17 August, here's a $100 compensation"? What about a rental car, or food delivery? Is it okay for your wedding photographer to show up a day late? Of course not, the product you bought is inherently time-sensitive.
Many businesses have a notion of partial delivery. If you hire a contractor to build an extension on your house and they get sick halfway through the project and hand off to another contractor who completes it a few weeks or even months late, you don't get it for free.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised that an airline lost money in one of the worst travel years of all time (due to Covid).
Cursory searching shows United made more than $3,000,000,000 in 2024. So even if 2025 was an unusually good year for them, it wasn't a complete anomaly. Just goes to show that when flights get delayed due to insufficient available crew or maintenance issues, it's a savings that's passed on to investors and the c-suite at the expense of consumers.
Sorry man, your "just goes to show" ain't gonna cut it. Yes, I want better perks when the going gets rough, but it's not enough to blame only the c-suite and shareholders. This isn't software dev. Prior discussion on the article I shared in the other comment:
> Yes, I want better perks when the going gets rough
Maybe you're not understanding what we're saying. There have been numerous comments remarking on flights that were delayed or canceled due to corporate decisions, which reduce to excess savings on (or insufficient investment in) maintenance and staffing. This has nothing to do with "better perks"!
Every dollar of profit is a dollar that could have been spent on maintenance and staffing, or god forbid, proactive investment in better systems and infrastructure. No one is saying that airlines should become non-profits. But I have a feeling three or four or five BILLION dollars in profits is too much.
I will be clear: I don't want to stand in line for 3 hours at Frankfurt with a MacBook Pro and a million other things in my backpack to be offered only a faraway hotel I don't want, no vouchers or cash, just take it or leave it, and no other compensation, and my luggage being lost for literally 11 weeks.
My understanding is that a portion of net profits might go towards rewarding shareholders through buybacks (bolstering the stock price), but most of it is reinvested into the business, i.e. exactly what you are saying you wish they would do. A windfall enables them to purchase more aircraft and pay down debt accumulated in the years they do not make much in profit, of which there were many in recent history. Is it too much profit? I don't know, but they're spending over $7 billion in capital expenditures this year.
I'm not sure what to say to you wanting them to have better tech. I wrote code for a major shipping company over 2 decades ago, and it's impressive to me that airlines mishandle bags at a far lower rate (under half a percent) than UPS and Fedex which usually are around 3-5%. I'm not a logistics expert. Will things get better with robots or something? Time will tell.
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.
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?
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.
Depends on the SLA. Usually you negotiate an SLA to cover much more than a refund of the missed service targets (but with a fixed/known ahead of time cost for breaching the SLA).
I would say even smaller; but more than 90% of those SLAs will have explicit remediation and compensation clauses, hence “usually” wrt. to negotiating an SLA.
> 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?
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.
> generally we insure ourselves against acts of nature and accidents and thieves.
No. We insure ourselves against unforeseen events whose effects are financially unbearable to us otherwise. You've conveniently carved out certain unforeseen events in order to serve your point rather than being intellectually honest.
Businesses insure themselves against the death of an important employee, for example. If that employee is murdered, that is neither an act of nature, an accident, nor thievery.
You might argue "you were robbed of an employee" and stretch the meaning of the word "thief" but then I'd say a similar stretching of "act of nature [or] accident" includes "aircraft malfunction"
Businesses also insure against a great many other things.
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.
It probably doesn't make sense for every airline to have a backup at every airport. But maybe the airport itself keeps a couple of backup planes that it rents out to airlines when they need it.
> 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.
You can sue anyone for anything. But when a service provider can't provide service because of acts of god, accidents, safety issues, or equipment failure, that's just... reality. Courts are not going to give you a huge payout because Delta refused to fly you in a broken plane to make your meeting. This is why insurance is a thing.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Can you find language in the ticket contract that says “by a certain time"?
It would kinda surprise me if that’s true. There’s an enormous difference in cost to provide a best effort, usually fine service, and a contract to get you there by a deadline. I could be mistaken but I bet there is no such promise.
Crews "time out" due to regulations governing duty hours, not airline policy. Many things can delay or disrupt travel, including weather, mechanical problems (which to a degree may be on the airline but random failures happen too), closures or bad weather at your destination, or at other airports that are creating a backlog of diversions at your destination. It's unreasonable to expect that even the best-intentioned airline can avoid all of that all of the time.
Travel insurance is can be purchased for situations where a delay or canceled flight would create unusual costs for the traveler.
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.
I just want to note that pretty much all airlines and travel credit cards and other similar services offer travel insurance products that deliver this exact “take care of every travel risk” coverage if you want it. You just have to pay for the real cost of that service.
However, your airline ticket alone is not that. It’s just a contract to carry you from point A to point B, and that will happen at a scheduled time if everything goes well.
Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
Furthermore, there are basically no product categories that include all possible costs and internalizes all risks. Every single thing you buy has some kind of risk involved.
If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time. They don’t know or care if I traveled across town or across the world to see that event. It’s not their financial responsibility if I blew $2,000 flying to NYC from some far away country to see their event.
When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages. Even if they do compensate me for outages, they don’t compensate me based on the specific amount of disruption it caused in my life. I don’t get to tell the utility company “I work from home as a lawyer and this outage cost me $500/hour” and magically get that amount compensated to me.
If my local baseball game gets rained out and the game is made up another game, it’s not the team’s responsibility if I’m no longer in town or can’t make the new time. They even sell insurance for this very possibility when you buy group suite tickets. If you don’t buy the insurance you are SOL during a rain-out.
You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time. When you buy a car there’s no guarantee that there will be a set cost of maintenance or that unexpected problems will not occur, there’s only a highly limited warranty to cover manufacturing defects. Warranty length and coverage varies widely by manufacturer.
Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Software has no warranty. At all. Period. Not even enterprise software. At best you get a service agreement where you get some kind of pittance of a reimbursement when something goes wrong.
>I just want to note that pretty much all airlines and travel credit cards and other similar services offer travel insurance products that deliver this exact “take care of every travel risk” coverage if you want it.
And that's wrong. Same as warranties on products being far, far below reasonably expected working lifetime but with the option to have an added warranty. That sort of behavior is very common in our society at this point, but it's all bad.
>You just have to pay for the real cost of that service.
Ie, you just have to except the airlines externalizing that onto society right now. Doesn't mean we can't advocate for a free market instead though.
>Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
You are demonstrating incredibly muddled thinking here, as well as leaping into your own brand new strawmen. Saying how things "should" be by definition is not saying how they are. I argued specifically against a strawman and incorrect point, and I said that it was a "request", I never claimed the contracts were secret or didn't have all sorts of BS escape clauses that, in many jurisdictions (though not so much in the EU), are unfortunately legal.
>If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time.
The broadway show doesn't involve taking physical control over your physical body in time and space. You cannot just step out and leave partway through a flight. That you'd use this as an example is either stupid or malicious.
>When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages
Your utility is massively regulated and depending on jurisdiction yes, they will indeed pay for certain levels of issues, as PG&E has been discovering in California over the last few decades. You don't pay for power not delivered, you are allowed to generate your own power and store it. There are SLAs available for utility services as well.
>You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time
>Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Which, again, is bad, not good as you are arguing. That bad stuff exists elsewhere does not in fact mean we can't want to improve where possible incrementally.
Yes, we live in society the whole time, and no doubt you are very smart.
Where I find this subject difficult to converge to is the exact point of “things should be” lies.
I would be in agreement with you that more customer protections are usually a good thing and that most jurisdictions on this planet really don’t have enough of them. Certainly I would agree that airlines shouldn’t be allowed to engage in as many anti-consumer games as they play in the status quo.
That said, I think we can both understand that there has to be a limit at some point to the risk internalization that a business can be reasonably expected to bear just to exist and sell products. Otherwise, it pushes costs higher for everyone and makes competition more difficult to come by.
It also limits product choice because many consumers prefer to choose higher risk options specifically to save on cost.
If airlines have to charge 10% more now because they have to compensate everyone’s hotel, car rental, and wasted DisneyWorld tickets for every canceled/delayed flight (I’m not saying you are advocating for such a thing, just a hypothetical), and I’m a customer who has a flexible schedule and never utilizes those compensations, now I’m just paying 10% more to get no additional protection for me personally.
This concept is essentially imposing a risk tax on all of society to normalize risks, and it might be argued that such a tax is not very progressive or productive.
Regardless of where we decided to specifically draw the line, any increase in compensatory duties imposed on airlines will increase pricing for their services. The airline industry is the perfect case study for that idea because it’s essentially a zero-margin business. Almost every US airline loses money flying and makes up for those losses with credit card programs. So if they have to start compensating for more scenarios, our ticket prices are going up, guaranteed. It’s not like Apple where imposing mandatory replaceable batteries or a 2 year warranty would barely change the economics of their business and greatly benefit consumers.
My main idea was not to bring up a bunch of irrelevant strawman examples, they were more to point out the fact that acceptable harm or risk is something of a universal concept in commerce. It’s not reasonable to ask beer companies to pay for every health complication of alcoholics just like it’s not reasonable to ask airlines to pay for every consequence of a delayed flight. This is because the level of risk was already agreed to by society: everyone knows that beer is bad for your health[1] just like everyone knows flights sometimes get delayed or canceled.
[1] The only reason the tobacco industry got into legal trouble is because they lied about their knowledge of its unhealthiness and addictive qualities.
In agreement with your points, but I think something even more pertinent to airlines compared to beer companies, is that a brewery is almost incentivized to create alcoholics. The only natural distinctives are at the extremes. Extreme alcoholics die and therefore stop buying booze, and social backlash to extreme levels of liquor consumption can cause profit-hampering regulations or outright prohibition. But in general, a person who empties a six pack every night after work is ideal for Coors.
Contrast this to airlines. They have ZERO incentives to delay your flight. They have zero incentive to divert passengers to another airport. They have no incentive to cancel, or otherwise prevent their plane from getting to its destination. Their interests are fully aligned with yours in this regard.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I got mad when airline checked us in for a flight, during a blizzard, took our luggage, then cancelled our flight and refused to give us our luggage back promising to fedex it to us. Fortunately we noticed a lot of luggage on the ground and eventually found ours and just took it despite protests.
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.
The company has a lot more to lose from pilots taking risks than from angry passengers who missed their meetings.
Everything done to and in an airplane is recorded, there are standard procedures for emergency situations, which pilots are expected to follow, and if the pilot didn't, he needs a really good reason, and avoiding passengers suing the company for compensation is not a good reason. We may be taking criminal charges here, this is one of the few cases where high ranking officials can go to prison, in addition to fines big enough to bankrupt the company. This is serious business, and the reason why aviation is so safe despite the risks inherent to flying.
Safety, and in particular compliance with safety regulations is non-negotiable. And you will notice that even the shittiest airlines (including Spirit) have a safety record on par with the best. It is just too risky to try to save money here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
