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The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket

258 点作者 chha将近 6 年前

20 条评论

JackFr将近 6 年前
&gt; of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations.<p>So for a period of three and a half years, he booked about 2.3 flights a day, every day, and then only flew on about 1 in 6 of them. And he did a similar thing with his companion ticket.<p>There is a cost to this — 1st class seats the airline couldn’t sell or give to more valuable customers. The greater cost to the airline it seems was not flying this guy around, but his cancellations - which cost him nothing. And I think the judge, and many reasonable people would say that while the rules are unclear, he was clearly acting in bad faith.
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zwaps将近 6 年前
On the one hand, AA could have handled this much better. The author repeats almost every paragraph that even though the bookings were &quot;fraudulent&quot;, AA never had an issue with them until they wanted to cancel the pass.<p>On the other hand, the whole article reeks of privilege, both by the rich-kid author and the guy. I understand that it is unfair to reneg. But the pass, and the whole system these people live in, is based on unsustainable and negative externalities on people who certainly can not fly to Sweden or Paris just to pick up flowers!<p>Indeed, the &quot;identity&quot; of using an airplane like a bus is not a good one. Airplane travel is one contributor to climate change, something that will (of course) hit poor countries really hard.<p>Again, I understand the feeling when something like that is taken away. But beyond a miniscule, yet direct, contribution to climate change, someone who just flies across the ocean because he (or she) can to do something that could have been done at home as well, and call it an &quot;identity&quot; - ignoring that it has a real and terrible effect (even if the contribution is small) on the weakest among us - I dunno.<p>In that light, I just can&#x27;t help to feel disgusted by this guy. Now, I am sure I am not the one who should throw the first stone etc... but she did write that article for me to read. So there it is.
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majormajor将近 6 年前
There&#x27;s an interesting angle here of what a &quot;superpower&quot; does to someone&#x27;s psychology. He internalized the ability to do these extraordinary things - including using the phone staff as a therapist line - as such a part of his identity, that he was devastated by having to live normally again. It&#x27;s hard for myself to imagine myself getting to the point where I think I&#x27;m that special, but I&#x27;m not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and&#x2F;or privilege for decades it couldn&#x27;t happen to me too.<p>&gt; “So in my incoherent state,” he writes, “I would book a seat for Dan or Laurie just imagining that they might come. I was making reservations and didn’t know whether I was even going. Here is why. I was up and [alone] in my home office and bored. So I would call the 800 number for the AAirpass desk and talk to the agent about the news or the weather or about Paris or little London. Then, after an hour of nothing they had to hang up. So I would make a reservation and ask them to fax it to me. Then the next day I would take the fax and cancel the reservation. I needed someone to talk to at midnight. The 800 number was open.”<p>Even his son says up front that he doesn&#x27;t see what his dad was doing as such a sensational, extraordinary thing, that that description &quot;doesn’t quite land,&quot; which is astonishing too.
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gesman将近 6 年前
This is the story of typically bad business decision of offering anything &quot;unlimited&quot;.<p>I just cancelled my account with the vendor of &quot;unlimited&quot; cloud storage (who would throttle uploads to their promised unlimited cloud storage to curb the effects of bad business decision) to the benefit of clear, high performance vendor.<p>Whenver you see &quot;unlimited&quot; or &quot;unlimted forever&quot; - question this. If nothing else - ride the wave but don&#x27;t expect it to be &quot;unlimited&quot; or &quot;forever&quot;.
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tomnipotent将近 6 年前
This guy was clearly abusing the program.<p>&quot;...of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations. During the same time period, he booked 2,648 flight segments for travel companions, and 2,269 were either canceled or a no-show.&quot;<p>Booked 3,009 flight segments in ~42 months. That&#x27;s 17 flights a week, or 2.4 a day. He was basically using the companion pass to reserve empty seats.<p>Did American screw up by not having better usage guidelines? Yes. Did this guy take clear advantage of this program with bad faith? Yes.
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danielfoster将近 6 年前
It seems like AA had reasonable issues with how the pass was used, but it was pretty clear they were simply looking for justifications to cancel it. A warning and clarification of terms would have been sufficient.<p>But I&#x27;m sure cancelling these passes reduced expenses-- at least on paper.
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Ayesh将近 6 年前
One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year.<p>With so many pointless flights, I can&#x27;t even wrap my head around his environment foot print.
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manigandham将近 6 年前
Heard about the AAirpass from Mark Cuban who calls it one of the best things he&#x27;s ever bought. If I had 250k to spend on one, I&#x27;d definitely do it too. There&#x27;s something magical about being able to point to a place on the globe and get there in hours and apparently there&#x27;s still a few valid ones out there.
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hmmhm将近 6 年前
Yet another worthless article lamenting the fact that an immensely privileged person had a minor inconvenience to their lifestyle.<p>It&#x27;s not exactly something that &quot;gratifies one&#x27;s intellectual curiosity&quot;, as according to the HN guidelines - obsessing over the idle rich is not an intellectual pursuit.
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markvdb将近 6 年前
Reminds me of Max-Hervé George and his fund investment contract:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jkb0x" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jkb0x</a>
j7ake将近 6 年前
This was a captivating article of a time when a company severely mispriced a product. I wonder what are today’s products that have this sort of potential mispricings?
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rkagerer将近 6 年前
The decent thing to do would have been to give him a warning first, before they suddenly revoked the pass.
jmkni将近 6 年前
Interesting read, one note:<p>&gt; Dad’s luggage went to London. They wouldn’t help him get it back. He called someone in the baggage department at Heathrow, who assisted. Aamil never made it to Sarajevo. In fact, that was one of the last times they ever spoke. Ultimately, Aamil disappeared from our lives.<p>After the Lockerbie bombing, I thought that aviation rules where changed to prevent a flight taking off if the owner of checked in luggage isn&#x27;t on board the plane, so this was a bit surprising. I wonder if AA broke a few rules here in their haste to terminate the pass?
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dkersten将近 6 年前
&gt; taking away something integral to who he was.<p>Uhh... so flying at a very discounted rate was integral to who he was? His identity? That seems a bit much. I&#x27;m finding it hard to sympathise with this guy, although AA sold a &quot;lifetime&quot; ticket, so that was their mistake and they should honour it. If it had turned out to have made them money instead, they&#x27;d happily continue. They made a miscalculation, that&#x27;s on them.
Latteland将近 6 年前
Did they terminate other people&#x27;s tickets? The interesting article does mention booking the extra seat and not using it.
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4ntonius8lock将近 6 年前
I feel this is the dystopia we are heading to.<p>Not some big brother.<p>Not some soma magic happy pill.<p>But rather a convoluted mess of &#x27;user agreements&#x27; - which are designed to basically give all power to the corporate masters that create them. Some of them are even auto tripped by filters and algorithms.<p>If I took the money of a corporation and then reneged on providing what I promised at the time of billing, I&#x27;d get sued to death, and even imprisoned.<p>But a paypal account? Uber? Upwork? - Closed, earnings forfeit and anything else they want to do. Sometimes, no human recourse at all, just machines deciding.<p>The worst part is that the majority of the population are inclined to side with the powerful, just look at some of the comments. Some people can&#x27;t see theft if it is done by the powerful, it becomes &#x27;enforcement of rules&#x27;, or &#x27;use of tips to pay services&#x27;, or &#x27;creation of accounts to increase fees&#x27;, or &#x27;forfeiture of funds&#x27;.
DebtDeflation将近 6 年前
I have a hard time feeling sympathetic to either party here. Clearly the man was violating the terms of the contract with speculative bookings and booking seats for his luggage under fake names. OTOH, the airline clearly intended for these to be like lifetime gym memberships where people buy them and then hardly use them (an unrealistic expectation for something that cost $250K in 1980&#x27;s dollars) and was looking for any way possible to cancel their obligations once this didn&#x27;t play out as hoped.
dang将近 6 年前
Previous AAirpass thread (2012): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12802751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12802751</a>.<p>I think there were others?
rabidrat将近 6 年前
I&#x27;m really struggling to get my head around the emotional trauma here. He bought the unlimited ticket, got many multiples of value from it over 30 years, and then they renegged. Had they never offered the ticket, he would have paid much more overall (even though he would almost certainly have also flown less), and would only be exactly where he is now: a poor schlub who has to buy airline tickets to travel. Where is the loss?
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ganesh7将近 6 年前
Every regular customer should be thankful this was put to an end. Keep in mind such every regular customer will have to pay for such extravaganza that will have to be reflected in the ticket prices after all.