https://www.npr.org/2019/02/13/694352593/lufthansa-airlines-sues-customer-who-skipped-part-of-his-return-flight
In short, the passenger booked a round trip flight from Oslo to Seattle (with a layover in Frankfurt) for about $741. While returning from Seattle, he then got off in Frankfurt and thence flew to Berlin on a completely separate ticket. Lufthansa says that the cost of his flight ought to have been about $2300 more if he had bought it "properly", and wants him to pay the difference.
So let's make this simple. Let's say you want to get from New York to LA. But the flights are more expensive than a flight from New York to Lake Tahoe that has a layover in LA. So by buying the NY>LA>Tahoe ticket and just getting off in LA, you save money. But then the airline catches wind of it and demands you to pay the difference since you really wanted a NY>LA flight.
One would hope you'd tell them to pound sand. You took advantage of their pricing. "But then they can't sell the seat from LA to Tahoe!" Wrong! That seat was sold, you paid for it. Whether you use it or not is immaterial, it was paid for in full by you. And this argument is doubly rich from an industry that thinks little of double-booking seats because they expect passengers to miss flights or not fly for some reason.
But what truly amuses me is that Lufthansa's argument explicitly says that if you buy a ticket you are obligated to use all parts of the ticket, or else they'll sue. Which leads me to the idea that if they believe that missing (or not taking) a flight grants them the right to charge you for the price of a ticket from your origin to the layover city you actually stop at, then that allows them to demand money from every passenger stranded in a layover city every time there's a weather cancellation, or mechanical problem, or other flight delay. Talk about perverse incentives!
9 comments:
I'm looking forward to the argument for contract damages. The passenger gave an implied warranty that he would provide a service to the airline in the form of his bum on a seat? And when he failed to perform, the airline suffered a quantifiable loss?
Suppose the passenger had gotten stuck in traffic and failed to make it back to the gate. Would the airline have been tempted to hold the flight in order to avoid losing the advantage of his presence on the last leg? Were neighboring passengers deprived of his conversation, or the comfort of knowing he would help force open the emergency door in the event of an evacuation? Did he fail to buy the expected cocktail?
Zey are CHERMAN!!!!11!! Ist vay zey DO zinks!
Just to compound the stupidity, this is an appeal they are filing after their original case was dismissed -- and by a German court.
But, but--the Green New Deal will make all that moot.
T99: Would the airline have been tempted to hold the flight in order to avoid losing the advantage of his presence on the last leg?
Obligated, to the shareholders--fiscal prudence, and all that--to hold the flight: their bottom line revenue depends on his honoring the cheaper ticket that he bought.
Were neighboring passengers deprived of his conversation....
Social butterfly that I am, my neighboring passengers are deprived of my conversation even when I'm in my seat. I actively avoid conversation and other such unwanted and unwarranted intrusions into my working, or my reading, or my napping, or my just sitting there minding my own d*ed business.
Eric Hines
The discounts on round trips with longer layovers (for presumably perfectly reasonable supply and demand reasons) were steep enough that I knew a man who traveled back and forth to the same city often enough that he would buy multiple round-trip tickets, with long layovers, and interleave them in order to effectively take shorter layover round trips. I gather somebody got wise to the trick.
And the discounts relative to one-way trips were large enough that I knew several people who would systematically buy round trips and simply discard the leg they didn't plan to use.
The obvious side-effect of people doing this is that the price of round trip tickets will have to go up.
The only way this would make any sense is if there were other costs incurred by the airline- such as having to go through and pull luggage off the plane because the passenger was not on board.
It may mean lost revenue. An aircraft likely covers flights between several distinct city pairs in a cycle, and likely one or more of those flights represent the need to have a plane with a specific configuration at the destination in order to cover a flight to a third city. The airline has an interest in encouraging some use of that capacity by discounting the tickets. Remove that incentive by allowing this kind of arbitrage, and every body's ticket prices go up.
There's likely some regulatory factors at play as well- I know that some more remote destinations get some subsidies to keep those routes open, ostensibly for the public good.
I'd be really surprised if regulations (given the sheer quantity of them) wasn't a factor.
Livestock work for their corporation masters and banks, not the other way around. It is something told to the people, that they are the masters and the corps and banks are their servants... in reality that's reversed.
When people wake up to this reality and Matrix, suddenly it is like a Red Pill.
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