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You know, just because that's the way it's been done forever does not make it right. The lady next to my cube has a sign about tradition, which is what the bad flying experience has become in America:

http://www.despair.com/tradition.html

Reading the replies, I realize how mediocrity can settle in just through the inability to shake your head and say "There must be a better way!" I'm totally used to having my latter flight-segments canceled when I miss the first leg, the airlines are used to it - we've settled into a steady state of poor customer delivery and poor customer experience, without realizing - there might be a new potential out there.

I think a great deal of the success of ycombinator type companies, consists of people who have not yet accepted (or refuse to accept) that poor customer experience should be the norm. Mint arose from a team that realized they could do better than Intuit. Google came about _even when it was clear to everyone_ that search was a solved problem, with little reason for new entrants - except for the fact that search results were crappy.

The Meta-Meta lesson here is that one way of deciding what to do for a new business, is look for through your daily experience of disappointments, and poor customer service, and ask yourself "How could I make the pain go away and get paid to do so."

So, Okay - I get it. Rich Aberman, is not the type of person to accept, as granted, a poor customer experience. I am. But, then again - one of us founded WePay, the other is an Enterprise Network Manager.

Buy full-fare tickets for each leg and you don't have this problem. Cancel at the last second, fly any day you want (as long as there is space). Change your plans on a whim.

If you get a package deal though - it's a package.

But nobody wants to pay full-fare - they want to pay about a quarter of that. Sure, we may all be saying "Well that's just how it is"... but you know what? That's just how it is.

If he was no longer a customer, I assume they refunded his money?

If they did not refund his money, he was still a customer - a customer who was denied his product, certainly, but a customer nonetheless.

If you buy my product, and I don't deliver it to you for reason X, that doesn't mean you're not my customer. It just means I suck at delivering my product.

The 'product' in this case was some abstract crap like 'the right to fly at a particular time pursuant to the terms and conditions set out on the website.' They're doing a great job of delivering their product; it's just a lousy product.

What if I choose not to pick up the product at the time we agreed upon without notifying you, causing you to make decisions about inventory and perhaps selling the product to someone else, and then return to you demanding the product at a later date?

He already paid for the product. In fact the delivery of the product came in 2 shipments.

For the first shipment he basically said to throw in the trash, now you as a business could throw it in the trash, or resell it since it's going to waste.

The customer was there for the second shipment yet you were not there to deliver.

Poor example. Implies you being forced to do things you would otherwise not have to do, which wasn't in the original example.

Better would be: If you rented me an apartment and I didn't move in right away. It would be unfair for me to demand a refund for the time I didn't move in, but it would also be unfair for you to rent the apartment to someone else if I already paid you for it.

Multiple leases I've signed had provisions about failure to take possession. If I didn't move in right away, or moved out early, I still owed the full rent for the lease period, but the owner could rent the place out to somebody else. (whether or not that's enforceable in a particular municipality is an entirely different matter)

He bought a seat on the plane. That he didn't use it doesn't mean it wasn't still his seat. If I ran the airline, I'd give him a 50% refund for the return leg, but if he didn't notify me that he wouldn't be taking the first flight I may not have been able to offer that seat to another paying customer.

Almost every flight during peak travel periods is oversold, which means that the airlines are selling more seats than they have (which sounds like fraud, since if you end up in an oversold flight and no one cancels, they ask the PASSENGERS to make the sacrifice, even though the reality is that the airline sold something that they no longer had)... so there was almost certainly someone else who got his seat.

The article wasn't just about their policy, it was about how they ridiculed and failed to help a customer find a solution when they were ensnared by a little known policy (perhaps you know it, but I would argue it is not widely known) and ultimately drove that customers business and possibly the business of others the customer tells his story too, to another airline.

> In my experience, that basically canceled his set of flights ,and he was no longer a customer. That's been my experience for at least 10 years of flying.

That's not how it works. If you pay for something you do not receive, it doesn't cease making you a customer. Now, maybe for the past 10 years you've been paying for things you don't get. In that case, I hate to tell you buddy, but you've been scammed.

It's not Virgin America's policy.

Also, in regard to me not being a "customer" (and that justifying their attitude): how do you define "customer"? If I don't have an active ticket with them, am I no longer a United customer? What if I bought one in the past, and have every intention of buying another on in the future?

So, you wouldn't say "they lost a customer"?

In my experience, that basically canceled his set of flights

So he should have learned from your experience?

Perhaps it's because you stopped reading that you missed the point of the post, which is how crappily the United employees treated him on a human level, how much better the Virgin people were, and the implications of this for running a business.

why would an airline cancel your flight if you skip part of it? didn't you outright buy the tickets in the first place?

Because there is a very high correlation between missing the first leg and missing the second leg perhaps?

The main reason is really to try to maintain their market segmentation by prohibiting people from buying tickets other than exactly the ones they choose to fly. If they allowed this, it'd be impossible for them to charge more for one-way tickets than round-trip tickets, as many airlines do.

Other prohibited things include: buying a one-stop "A->B->C" ticket and then getting off in B, because you really wanted to go A->B, but it was priced higher; and buying two opposite-direction interlocking round trips, in order to make two short trips appear to be two overlapping longer trips (thus avoiding the "short trip" fare penalties).

Basically airlines are trying to run a purposely inefficient market, and as always happens in such markets, market participants attempt arbitrage strategies, and here the airlines are attempting in turn to prohibit the arbitrage strategies.

I think its even worse. Airlines and their employees know that you have little negotiation power at the terminal (cost, schedule, and security make you virtually powerless).

A story I have is years ago at Continental. I came to the desk to check my suitcase. It was over some weight and so the lady said I had to pay, I believe $75. I had some swag in the bag that I could throwaway that would bring me under. Of course she makes me leave the line to throw it away, although there was a trash can not 15 feet away.

I get back in line, get to the desk and its her again. She weighs my bag... it's under the weight limit. Great! Wait, she still wants $75?! Huh? Apparently I just threw the items away, but the bag was originally weighed more than the limit and her claim was their policy was not to allow reweighings. And certain I've seen people do it before and I ask to see the policy. She says I have to contact customer service, but probably won't make my flight if I do -- and she's probably right on that point.

I'm pretty irate at this point, and ask to see the supervisor and she says she is. She says if I have a problem to take it up with the corporate office, or get out of line. I pay the $75, get on the plane, write a letter to Continental and never hear from them again.

To this day, I refuse to fly Continental.

Situations like this are exactly why I'm really glad chargebacks exist.

Getting in trouble for interlocking round trips is exceedingly rare, and you can always just book on multiple carriers.

Burning the return leg of a roundtrip is usually also totally penalty free.

Getting off at a stopover is much more borderline, and it's almost impossible to get your luggage checked only to the stopover destination.

Lucky for me is I hate travelling with anything but hand luggage. So, unless I'm going to be away for a long period of time or theres some other reason why I may need more luggage than I can carry ont he plane with me, this isn't a problem for me.

I personally think flying SFO-LAX is absurd; I drive SFO-LAX, SFO-PDX, SFO-LAS, SFO-SAN, and usually SFO-SEA vs. fly. And I fly Virgin America or Alaska instead of United when possible because I'm very familiar with United's quality of service and product.

No, it's because airline ticket pricing is simply based on the maximum amount of money they can get out of you. Some examples:

A one way ticket nearly always costs more than half the amount of a round trip ticket. So to prevent people from using one half of a round trip, they cancel your entire ticket.

Even better: when Delta had a huge hub here in Cincinnati, they owned something like 80 - 90% of the flights at the airport. They jacked the prices up to the point this was the most expensive destination in the country. However flights out of the Dayton airport 50 miles away were $100s cheaper - including on Delta. And the Delta flight would connect in Cincinnati! When I asked what would happen if I just flew out of Cincinnati and ignored the Dayton - Cincy leg, I was told they would cancel the entire ticket. Same thinking as the first example.

A study at one point showed something like 1,500+ people a day were flying out of Dayton rather than Cincinnati because of the cost difference. While the lost jobs hurt when Delta merged with Northwest and pretty much moved their hub away, I was happy to see them go.

They should be happy. He paid for the ticket and they get a weight savings which should help with the fuel costs.

I have to call BS on that.

He bought the tickets, so how does not using them make him no longer a customer? If they gave him a refund (ha!), then yes... otherwise, no.