Lawyers automate this, so why don't airlines?

I think I disagree on the flight having been canceled. I&#x27;d have assumed the distinguishing factor between a flight cancellation vs. rescheduling isn&#x27;t the flight number (a flight number seems like an immaterial bookkeeping abstraction?), but rather, whether a replacement flight <i>offers seats to all of the passengers of the first flight</i>. It seems they did this, as they say in their text message. As far as semantics is concerned, this is where it ends for me.<p>Looking at it from a practical standpoint, the company still incurred the same costs of the original flight just at a later time, and they had reserved seats for all the passengers, so it doesn&#x27;t make sense for them to compensate as if the replacement flight had never taken place at all. [1] Had the author contacted them to let them know he wouldn&#x27;t be showing up, they could&#x27;ve had a chance to agree and even to give his seat to someone else... but he just decided not to just not show up. At that point it doesn&#x27;t make sense to get compensated as if the company had just let the seat disappear into thin air (no pun intended). [1]<p>[1] It seems people are misreading my comment to mean I think he shouldn&#x27;t be compensated at all. I&#x27;m <i>not</i> saying he shouldn&#x27;t be compensated. (&quot;As if&quot; is the key phrase here.) I&#x27;m saying any compensation he receives should be for the flight being <i>delayed</i>, not <i>canceled</i>—whatever amount might be appropriate for each.

&gt; potentially catastrophic consequences of the cabin pressure system failing at cruising altitude, I considered that everyone on the plane had been very lucky.<p>The cabin pressurization system failing at cruising altitude is one of the more common types of aircraft incidents. That&#x27;s why planes are equipped with systems to handle it. While a catastrophic outcome is not impossible, it is exceedingly unlikely.<p>As to the compensation issue, airlines should be required to pay out the compensation automatically, with 3x the compensation automatically due as a penalty if the customer has to make them pay through the courts. This would remove the incentive to make it hard for customers to claim the compensation.<p>Given that I by now unfortunately have a decent understanding of the compensation rules, if I have a claim that I&#x27;m confident about and the airline doesn&#x27;t pay immediately, I&#x27;ll take it straight to court. If in a jurisdiction where they have to pay the lawyer fees, I&#x27;ll have a regular lawyer handle it - no need to let an agency take 30% if you know you&#x27;ll win and a lawyer can make some money (driving up the costs of misbehavior for the airline).<p>For consumer lawsuits you can often sue the airline at <i>your</i> local court, which isn&#x27;t overloaded.

Rather than booking the replacement flight directly the author should have had easyjet rebook him.<p>The author did no-show on the replacement flight provided by easyJet, and all of the griping will get them nowhere. You can’t take things into your own hands and then expect the company to refund you, the company would have provided the free alternative flight (earlier than the one the next day) and the EU fine had they just talked to a gate agent.<p>I’ve flown hundreds of thousands of miles and had my share of issues like this and you can always sort it out if you do it prior to taking the replacement flight.

Long story short:<p><i>Guy had flight canceled and wants airlines to have automated refund system.</i><p>The issue is though that no company I know of really wants an automated easy path to disperse money back to the public. Ever try to collect on an insurance policy?

The legitimacy of governments and of courts is primarily by belief - eg the courts are legitimate because most people believe that they are. There seem to be a lot of people out there who don’t understand this concept and don’t understand that western societies are not immune to mass unrest or violence or even insurrection. In particular it seems like courts and legislatures are failing at their most basic tasks in many western countries. I hope that in Europe that the legislatures or the courts intervene precipitously in these kinds of widespread fraud by corporations; a few executives going to jail as an example to others would quickly correct the situation. Otherwise this eats away at the credibility of the government in general and you just see more lawlessness.

Probably just whoever was reading the paperwork on the day. That&#x27;s an unfortunate turnout for the poster.<p>I&#x27;ve had exactly the same experience but different departure airport and won (flight didn&#x27;t go, I bought am immediate replacement seat myself, didn&#x27;t use the one that was reassigned to me so I could get there faster). I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;refund.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;refund.me</a>, excellent success rate and very little effort.<p>It would be amazing to see the same rules be followed around the world. It&#x27;s times like these I have a deep respect for the EU. Hm, does this mean that UK flights won&#x27;t be subject to this going forward?

&quot;Automated claims systems, why don’t airlines have these? They would save money on support staff&#x2F;legal fees&#x2F;etc. The could charge a couple of pounds&#x2F;dollars&#x2F;euros more per ticket and probably cover all compensation costs. We know that “no win no fee” claims services exist. They know they exist. They know that we know that they exist, so what the fuck are we all doing wasting our time here?&quot;<p>The answer is simple: You automate the things that earn you money. You don&#x27;t automate the things that make you pay money to others - perhaps with the exception of your supply chain or other resources you need to maintain business continuity.<p>The author is thinking like an engineer, not like a businessperson. Not that there&#x27;s anything wrong with thinking like an engineer where it&#x27;s called for, but airlines are profit-seeking businesses.

I know class action has a bad reputation, but this is the type of situation it was designed for. The courts can&#x27;t handle 100,000 individual claims but it can handle one very large claim with 100,000 members.

Slightly different but similarly annoying situation happened to me. Was flying back from Birmingham to Berlin, via Dusseldorf (with Eurowings, booked via Lufthansa). There was bad weather at Dusseldorf so the outgoing flight was delayed by an hour or so. Knowing that any passenger arriving at Dusseldorf would arrive at ~8:30pm, and thus miss their connecting flights for the day - they still insisted on people flying there. We arrived, and were stranded - obviously. Their agents closed the booth and tried to leave, but after a bunch of discussion they then wanted to put people on buses or trains to various parts of Germany overnight. A few of us demanded accommodation and ended up staying in the nearby hotel. After like 10 emails back and forth over the next week with the airline they ended up refusing to pay compensation, so I raised a claim with the consumer arbitration board in the country I live (soep-online.de). Two days later I get an email from the airline saying they&#x27;ll pay out. It seems so utterly scummy that they try lie and deceive consumers out of their rights - how are there not strict punishments in situations where airlines mislead and screw over consumers?

I tried to make a claim through the courts when EasyJet didn&#x27;t pay out the amount they were required to under EU law. I didn&#x27;t get a refund. I didn&#x27;t get a replacement booking (well, I was offered one leaving after my return flight). I got exactly nothing.<p>The court simply threw out my case because it was &quot;overloaded&quot;.<p>I think Easyjet might be exploiting this loophole to avoid paying customers whom they&#x27;ve fucked over.<p>I had another case against a different business which I launched and got thrown out because the courts were overloaded too.<p>The UK courts system appears to be <i>horrendously</i> underautomated. It was a mess of scanned written forms and calling up people to read credit card numbers over the phone. They really should deduct a <i>ton</i> of points on those &quot;ease of doing business&quot; metrics for this mess.

Travel cancellation insurance is a thing that exists. It would be nice to see a travel cancellation insurance product which pays out based on the following automatically and easily verifiable outcomes:<p>1. Customer turns up.<p>2. Plane leaves within a certain range around scheduled time.<p>3. Plane arrives at destination.<p>4. Plane arrives at destination within a certain range around the scheduled time.<p>5. The price of the trip.<p>6. Weather events make things difficult.<p>Airlines could either integrate or not.<p>Maybe the premiums would have to be higher due to a higher occurrence of payouts, but maybe they wouldn&#x27;t have to be so high due to the number of claims processing people you now do not have to employ.<p>Maybe I am oversimplifying.

Is there a service that provides crowd-sourced data on airplane reliability by registration number? The registration number is probably only revealed just before boarding though, so that would limit its utility.<p>&gt; we could see the registration number: G-EZRU. The exact same plane that had flown out of Geneva, had both its pressure systems fail, had been known to have other problems in its service history

I honestly believe that this is because it’s cheaper for them to make arrangements with the “no win no fee”-firms than to create a proper process.<p>When you get the first couple of “technically a lie but an excusable lie”-responds they pick out a couple of layers of complains each, then when you reach out the the “no win no fee” I’m certain their first 1-2 layers back to you are just steps in the same process “you might have a case but could take this small payment” “you have a case but it will take for ever, here’s a slightly higher offer” and these can be quickly negotiated because they just split the damage with the airline.<p>They have a multilevel yearlong process of starving our customers from extremely reasonable compensations, which they have deviously optimized so they can sell tickets at what? Maybe 10-20% lower rates and steal the high-volumes low rate market.<p>I think it’s naive to believe that this is all progressing without a level of collaboration between them and the airline that is at least unethical and potentially illegal.

UPS is similar. The process to make a claim for a lost, late, or damaged package is tedious and manual. I imagine that&#x27;s not a mistake.

&gt; Given the original arrival time was delayed by more than three hours we were covered by EU Regulation 261&#x2F;2004<p>I had similar situation a couple years ago and ended up using Airhelp.com to obtain my compensation. They took a cut of course but I had to do pretty much nothing beyond sending them my itinerary and I got a bank transfer in a couple of weeks. I am of course unaffiliated.

Similar experience with Wizz. They said that the flight was delayed (5-6h) due to &#x27;unforeseen circumstances&#x27;. When I reached out to them for the €200 they claimed that they will not, as it is was not their fault and for security reasons they cannot disclose to me the &#x27;why&#x27;.<p>I got a very close friend working for Wizz. He told me that this is the boilerplate BS email they send to all such requests, to scare them off. Reading it one may thing &quot;oh there may have been a terror-related thing, better not bother the CIA-FBI-NSA-PoPo-MI5-MI6-MI99... and that I should reach out to the responsible regulator and I&#x27;d get my money back. Which I did. I included the BS email. I assume the regulator didn&#x27;t buy the BS email from Wizz and I got paid. 3 months later, but Wizz lying bastards didn&#x27;t get away with it.

In the UK broadband providers have an automatic compensation scheme in the event things go wrong. The thing with law is it&#x27;s almost impossible to cover 100% of cases with words and letters - so case law is designed to facilitate what applies and what does not (and often gets it &#x27;wrong&#x27; according to society).<p>Ideally, there are conditions in which you get automatic compensation, in the form of a payment to your bank (as easily as you give company money they can give it to you).<p>If the tech is there to send a business money so can they send it to me if they don&#x27;t provide a good service, it&#x27;s not difficult.<p>We&#x27;re so advanced with our developments in AI yet so many things are basic and stuck in the past. This shouldn&#x27;t even be down to airlines - it&#x27;s a system that does all the work on behalf of the customer and business.

American Airlines (which flies to Europe and is covered under the EU regulations for flights to&#x2F;from the EU) doesn&#x27;t even mention the EU regulations or how to make a claim at all on their website. None. Not a word. You have to make a customer service request as if you were asking a question, and then know all the right things to say.<p>Businesses just aren&#x27;t optimizing for the things they hate. They&#x27;d rather do all they can to hide it and forget to mention it to you, if it weren&#x27;t illegal (and sometimes, still then). They will only do the letter of the law, and only to go through the motions, and only if the penalties for not are high and the risk of getting caught is equally high.

You have to book through them rather than by yourself. In fact, I&#x27;m very surprised he retained the flight back. Usually they cancel your return leg if you no-show the outbound leg.<p>It&#x27;s shitty stuff from the airlines for sure. But AFAIK, they all do this at this level.

I had quite a few flights and trains booked in March and early April. They were all canceled of course.<p>Out of all of them, EasyJet was the only company that let me have an instant refund on their website. Most of the others made me call them (I was on the Alitalia line for 90 minutes, after hours of being flatout rejected from the call queue), some I had to issue a chargeback, and some refunded me in November. One I’m still waiting.<p>I also booked the Bernina Express and the only refund option is to show up at one of their stations in Switzerland I guess.<p>This is to say that most travel companies operate in a similar non-automated fashion because that’s what makes them the most money. EasyJet is far from the exception.

The actual problem is not easyJet, though. They are complaint to the letter of the law. The problem is the law which is written in a way that allows easyJet to make the claims process as painful as possible. I have gone through this with a lot of stuff, most notoriously when dealing with landlords. On its face the law seems consumer friendly, but only when you try to use it, do you realize that you need to spend months&#x2F;years wrestling with the company to get your measly few hundred euros back, and you might even need to engage a lawyer.<p>I guess although engaging the lawyer seems optional at first glance, it is really the only way to get anything done.

I <i>like</i> the fact these compensation rules have massive loopholes.<p>If they didn&#x27;t, I think it would more than double the price of some tickets.<p>Sometimes I fly hundreds of miles for 10 euros (all taxes and fees included). There is no way a business can offer a refund of 300 euros if that flight is delayed.<p>Compensation should be an optional feature - I should be able to spend an extra 30 euros on my flight to get compensation in case of delay. Ask me when I book. Just like other insurance.

Airliners suck big time. I&#x27;m looking forward for a modern, honest, client-friendly airliner that will force everyone else out of business.

Lawyers have a financial incentive to automate these things. Airlines have a financial incentive NOT to automate them.

Tangential question: why do some British people put an “x” at the end of every text, like the author’s mom?

Perhaps the aviation industry is also in a sub-optimal Nash Equilibrium, and certain types of major changes need to happen en mass.

cultural quibble.<p>&gt; my partner<p>What per cent of the time is this &quot;romantic, or maybe even life&quot; or &quot;business&quot; partner? When married, the term &quot;spouse&quot; is always preferable.<p>- jgalt&#x27;s style guide

Airlines need to be extremely wary about automating things. This is an extremely sensitive matter, as it involves movement of people and people&#x27;s lives.<p>I have been on a Viber travel group supporting people trying to get into Croatia. It consists of many American citizens. Anyways, over the past couple of days, Delta&#x2F;United&#x2F;Iberia have been using artificial intelligence (AI) to &#x2F;automatically update&#x2F; where people can or cannot go, based off of government websites. Instead of having proper staff to look over these requirements, they use AI to screw over their customers, as the AI has errors in its interpretations for documentation required by travelers.<p>There have been a few people on this Viber group who have been wrongly denied boarding, right before their Christmas holiday, due to inconsistencies in the interpretations of the AI (multiple errors, type 1 and type 2), from the company Smartvel. Sadly, people of color have been the ones getting stopped more and denied boarding in the US.<p>This is the technology that I am talking about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartvel.com&#x2F;covid19-entry-restrictions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartvel.com&#x2F;covid19-entry-restrictions&#x2F;</a><p>This is the API plugin on Delta.com for Smartvel (fill out the to: Croatia from: USA): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.delta.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;plan-your-next-trip&#x2F;where-we-fly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.delta.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;plan-your-next-trip&#x2F;where-we-fly</a><p>This is the API plugin on United.com for Smartvel (fill out the to: Croatia from: USA): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.united.com&#x2F;ual&#x2F;en&#x2F;us&#x2F;fly&#x2F;travel&#x2F;restrictions-map.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.united.com&#x2F;ual&#x2F;en&#x2F;us&#x2F;fly&#x2F;travel&#x2F;restrictions-map...</a><p>Ironically, if you booked online using KLM.com (affiliated with Delta but a European airline) or Lufthansa.com (affiliated with United but a European airline) you were not subjected to this problem, even though it was the same flight through a codeshare arrangement via the airlines.<p>It really is inhumane. While people may not want people flying due to the coronavirus (honestly, I don&#x27;t but Croatia does need the business and I want them to see my country too), these people had their plans made and their holidays were ruined over AI. It is cruel.<p>By the way, I am a dual US|Croatian citizen, and if Croatia allows third country nationals, such as Americans in, then I think they should be allowed in. Also, if you spend 14 days in Croatia as an American, you can basically enter the EU without issue, but you may want to check <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reopen.europa.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reopen.europa.eu&#x2F;</a> for entry restrictions, country-to-country. It is a loophole.

Btw, an aircraft that may revolutionize the viability of regional and charter flights because of its low capex and opex costs:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Otto_Celera_500L" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Otto_Celera_500L</a><p>Mentour Pilot&#x27;s assessment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CN4EKZHYVaE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CN4EKZHYVaE</a>

Moderators, please.

What a click baity title :&#x2F;

I don&#x27;t know what the right answer is to this problem. But I do know that the right answer to this problem includes a blockchain.