The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket | Hacker News Reader

The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket

narratively.com

258 pointschha197 comments

> 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.

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.

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.

It was AA who was acting in bad faith.

If they wanted to stop the so-called fraudulent usage of the pass, they could have just asked. He cancelled so many flights because he thought that was allowed. If they told the guy he would lose his lifetime pass if he kept cancelling or no-showing, he would have stopped.

AA didn't give him a single warning. He always booked through an human agent, so they had plenty of opportunities. Instead they let him through airport security, and took his lifetime pass at the gate leaving him without his luggage.

This was clearly the act of a company that had a huge liability based on a one-sided contract that was easy for them to break out of. The only question is whether it was worth the PR hit, but it doesn't seem like the blowback has been that bad so far.

> they could have just asked

According to court documents they asked him when he was using fake names[1] in 2004. Instead he switched to names of friends that never showed up. They didn't terminate him until 2008.

> He canceled so many flights because he thought that was allowed.

He also made reservations for people that either didn't exist or had no idea that he made them. And in contrast to the article he didn't just do it to get space, he apparently let strangers he met at the airport use the seats.

> AA didn't give him a single warning.

Warned in 2004 terminated in 2008

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/illinoi...

Reading that decision: it looks like Rothstein specifically asked the sales agent what constituted "fraudulent use" at the time he purchased the pass. The court doesn't explain the agent's response, but goes on to argue that Rothstein could have forced the company to include it into the contract language -- and since he did not do that, that response doesn't bind the company.

Again, I don't know what the actual response was, but this hints that the explanation Rothstein was given at sales time was not the same as what American enforced upon him. I guess this may be a reasonable legal outcome, but it doesn't seem terribly just.

I feel like they were both acting in bad faith. He blamed his alcoholism and depression, AA blamed the speculative purchases, there’s more to the story on both sides.

I completely sympathize with him emotionally. But at the same time, he had a golden ticket with rules, he broke the rules for a long time and it took AA and an army of investigators to prove it and a court that agreed. You can say they should’ve warned him, but that’s business, the court found him in breach of contract, a contract that was costing AA $millions, it’s no wonder they sued him for breach instead of warning him when his booked seats were empty most of the time. You don’t get to play the victim when you’re in breach of contract and costing the counter party millions. Again, I sympathize with him emotionally. It sucks. Life isn’t always roses. It would have been nice of AA to warn him, yes. But they weren’t obligated to, and he was a smart finance guy who understood contracts. Even he seems more upset that they were “mean” about it than surprised it happened at all.

I would generally agree with your logic, but the problem here is that he broke AA's interpretation of a vaguely worded rule rather than clearly committing a violation of the terms. Given this AA should have contacted him about their view of "fradulent" usage.

> AA's interpretation of a vaguely worded rule

It's debatable whether or not frequent speculative bookings constitute fraud. It's not debatable whether booking a seat for your luggage with the companion pass under a fake name is fraud.

“The example given to me [by AA] was that Yo-Yo Ma ... flew with his [cello] in the next seat. Under those terms I bought the extra seat.”

AA endorsed the practice.

I agree with you.

And while I am quite sympathetic to this gentleman's story myself, and while I also don't even think the revocation of the AAirpass for him was morally warranted (or at least there we go into the fuzzy details of the suit), I just wanted to add that the brief "FRAUDULENT USAGE" excerpt does not at all create an expectation to my "IANAL" eyes that there were any advance warnings to be expected. So, while I can see a legal argument over the validity of the cancellation, I don't see it over some demand of having to be warned ahead of time. But again, IANAL, just a guy.

While I agree, even worse is that they were the final implementors of the supposed fraud. Their own booking concierge put every single one of those flights through.

They shot themselves in the foot thousands of times and then said it was fraud, even though he gained nothing.

It was abuse, but they didn't have an abuse cause.

Can't side with AA.

I don't think concierge could refuse booking - This guy had lifetime ticket. What should concierge say? I will not book a flight for you since you cancelled the one yesterday and the day before yesterday?

How about they have a policy of X cancellations and then a cool down period, then they could say "I'm sorry sir, because of your cancellation yesterday I can't book your flight until next week" and then allow only booking in an emergency (like they're trapped away from home).

No, they totally could. They didn't because they didn't care until they decided they wanted to axe the pass, and then they went looking for a pretext.

Dude is rich as hell and probably very hard to sympathize with on most other counts, but he got screwed by AA here.

Sure they could. Just as a bank will refuse a transfer if they think it is fraudulent.

Clearly he wasn't too rich and too special to be accused of fraud, as that's exactly what they accused him of, so why not refuse the booking and nip the fraud in the butt?

It's plain as day that the whole thing was retro-marked as fraud to take his ticket away.

>What should concierge say?

I'm sorry sir, the system is not allowing me to do this, You will need to contact corporate offices.

"What's going on, why have you cancelled so many flights? This isn't how the pass is intended to be used. Please only use it when you are likely to take the flight."

Listing the number based on flight segments makes it sound much worse than it really is. It seems like he flew internationally a lot -- so every round-trip cancellation could easily be 6 segments. I've often had to reschedule a trip twice. On those occasions, I'm only flying 0.33 of the segments I booked. His cancellations are only twice that. And with the golden ticket and no consequences, I could easily see a person with a busy schedule often booking two trips to have the seats reserved and then only taking the one they need. While he was abusing the system since there was no penalty, there are some of legitimate reasons too.

He literally said that he repeatedly booked flights that he had zero intention of ever taking just so he could talk to somebody on the phone.

> I'm only flying 0.33 of the segments I booked. His cancellations are only twice that.

Every single day for 3.5 years

You are quoting/repeating the very specific parameters, and words, specifically chosen by American's army of data analysts to best support its legal case and put Mr. Rothstein in the worst possible light. I seriously doubt American offered the raw reservation data to Mr. Rothstein so he could counter. How long was the average reservation active before it was cancelled? How many days before the flight were the reservations cancelled? What percentage were cancellations vs no-shows? What percent of the flights had open seats at all, or in first-class (prior to comped upgrades)? Why go back to exactly May 2005 -- was his cancellation rate declining by 2008?

>> There is a cost to this

A lower cost than if he actually flew all 3009 flight segments -- which he was fully entitled to do.

American doesn't have to offer that data. His lawyer could demand it in discovery. I'm sure that was done, any competent lawyer would have done so.

He was entitled to fly all 3009 segments, but if those were at least 2 hours per segment -- that's over 1700 hours a year. Way more than a pilot flies at 1000/year. So at a certain point it just becomes too impractical to fly that much. It's easy to book that many flights, however.

>which he was fully entitled to do.

And AA was entitled to sue for breach without warning. The blade cuts both ways.

How is that relevant to the quote? Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Are you claiming he was not entitled to fly all 3009 segments, had he chosen to?

No, I’m saying if you want to go by the letter of the rules, AA had no obligation to warn him, even if that would have been the nice thing to do. So pointing out what he was “legally entitled” to only makes AA’s case stronger because from a legal perspective he was more clearly in the wrong by booking empty seats with a fake name.

Please don't misquote me, I never used the phrase "legally entitled." Further, my post had nothing to do with his legal rights. The parent post that claimed AA was burdened with costs due to Mr. Rothstein's habitual cancellations, to which I noted the cost to AA of cancelling those reservations was far lower than the cost of him using all of those reservations.

Sorry, instead of "legally entitled" substitute "fully entitled" and I believe my point is the same, and I don't think you are steelmanning your parent post. Nobody in this thread disagrees that it's cheaper to have a cancelled reservation than a fulfilled one, so we must apply the principle of charity[1] here. Yes, the cost to AA would be far higher if he rode all of those trips that he cancelled. And if he flew all those 3000+ legs he booked, I would be 100% on his side, because that would show good faith on his side. However, I believe he was only able to book so many flights because he had no intention of flying most of them, which is evidenced by the fact he did not end up flying them. Because there is near-zero cost book and cancel, that is why the airline specifically put "no speculative bookings" in the golden ticket contract. Booking and flying requires the cost of the golden ticket holder's time which serves as a limiting factor.

It's a similar line of thinking to a past conversation on HN about how health care in the UK is paid with time, where everyone pays the same price, but that price is time, and in the UK they wait significantly more than they have to wait in the US, which discourages seeing the doctor for minor ailments because it might take most of your day or it might get scheduled weeks out.

I understand and sympathize with him emotionally, 100%. I'm speaking more from a business perspective where I completely support AA's legal right to terminate his pass, and was just trying to point out through the thread why AA was justified.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

As a frequent flyer, 2005-2008 was also a period of time when there were empty seats on planes and the airline industry was still recovering from 9/11. You could fly and half the plane might be empty. Cancellations fees weren't nearly as bad either.

Let's not jump to conclusions that he was acting in bad faith.

Officially[1] they terminated it based on him:

* Making up fake names

* Substituting these fake names for random travelers he picked up at the airport

* Once they warned him about the fake names he started to make up travel arraignments for friends.

As proof they showed his flight records. He argued that AAs ability to just terminate the contract based on his behavior was unenforceable.

[1]https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/illinoi...

First class tickets usually do not have cancellation fees. They’re fully refundable.

That's true. Reminds me of a story of a guy who would buy a first class ticket, go to the lounge and eat lunch, and then reschedule his ticket for the next day, every day... free lunch for a year[0].

0: https://nypost.com/2014/01/29/man-uses-first-class-plane-tic...

Isn’t the lounge usually inside security after checkin? You can still cancel after checking in with a ticket?

Yes. I’ve done it before - plans change

I re-booked a flight while in the security line because I got an alert that my original flight was delayed and was offered a "tap here to re-book on this flight" button.

So I did.

It took a minute to explain why my printed boarding pass no longer matched my flight itinerary when I got to the front of the security line, but not too big of a hassle.

But there’s no lost revenue - no actual cost - for cancelling a ticket nobody else was ever going to buy anyway.

Nobody bought it because it was unavailable.

And if he had flown, it still would have been unavailable. Along with the other thousands of booked flights.

This is a major part of the problem for me.

In my opinion, if you want to judge this as fraud, you have to do it, at least in part, by looking at it through the lense of a regular passenger.

If a regular passenger who pays for each ticket individually did this, would they have a problem? Of course not. AA could only dream of such a passenger.

They abused people's generally poor financial reasoning to claim fraud uncontested. It's easy to get people to think of this as "free flights for life, poor airline abused" simply because the ticket was so massively undervalued compared to the use potential. In reality, each and every one of those seats were paid for, AA were just upset with themselves for the price they charged and fabricated a fraud claim to end it.

These are two different products, akin to a subscription service vs outright buying something, so the comparison isn't apt. You can return something to the big box store where you bought it if you don't use it. You're not entitled to that with the subscription service.

It's not a subscription, he outright prepaid for the rest of his entire life, for the service he was paying for individually. So similar is the product, that a separate system wasn't even designed for it and he'd still get stuff like airmiles per flight.

It was a prepay for the same product, not a subscription for a new one.

It sounds like the tickets were cancelled the next day anyway, so it's not like they couldn't have re-sold or given away..

Why not tell him to stop? Why wait until years later? The problem is that their actions make it clear that they didn't have issues with his conduct. Rather, they decided to cut costs and as a result decided to retroactively reexamine behavior that they had clearly condoned, at least implicitly, years later.

He wasn't acting in bad faith - when they asked him to make changes to his behavior with the pass, he did. Every indication is that if the airline had politely asked him to stop booking flights and canceling them without a good reason, he would have. They were, on the other hand, clearly not acting in good faith. That's the issue.

On the one hand, AA could have handled this much better. The author repeats almost every paragraph that even though the bookings were "fraudulent", AA never had an issue with them until they wanted to cancel the pass.

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!

Indeed, the "identity" 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.

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 "identity" - ignoring that it has a real and terrible effect (even if the contribution is small) on the weakest among us - I dunno.

In that light, I just can'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.

To me, this story is a great illustration of how we humans will always try to become fat cats by clinging to and expanding upon any privilege we may have or comfortable situation we may find ourselves in. Be it something small, like free snacks in the breakroom at work, or something big, like free unlimited air travel, or something vast, like cheap abundant fossil energy, if there is any way whatsoever to externalize the costs of our privileges and benefits, then, naturally, that's what we do. And should this privilege that we have now come to consider our right ever be taken away, we are of course duly offended.

So I find this guy's reaction pretty understandable. I would love to think that I wouldn't so unreasonably take advantage of a playing field so absurdly tilted in my favor, and that I wouldn't be outraged when such a tilt was corrected. But such situations twist your perception of the world and it's hard to even know you're doing it.

>> privilege we may have

membership for which he paid $400k

>> such a tilt was ~~corrected~~

completely eliminated, without recourse

> completely eliminated, without recourse

For breaching the contractual agreement, something the court has also observed and ruled on.

This man indeed paid for something but then used it in a way that was an abuse from the contractual perspective and (saying this as a regular person) also from a common sense perspective. He showed a lot of bad faith and this undermined his case.

The lack of notification from AA of purported abuse should have been enough to get the case thrown out.

The abuse being serious enough to force AA to revoke the pass... yet not serious enough that they discovered or communicated it before they decided to revoke the pass?

I can't square that logic.

> membership for which he paid $400k

... from the proceeds from his work as a Bear Sterns stock broker.

He was in the right place, at the right time, with the right background, engaging in an industry which provides basically negative value to society. Pardon me if I shed no tears for this guy.

That seems like a shaky moral foundation.

What he did to make a living doesn't seem material, nor does the fact that he was a [shock quotes]Bear Stern's stock broker[/].

Everybody does something, but the US is supposed to be a country ruled by law.

American mispriced the offer, and several people (including Mark Cuban) bought it, signed a contract, and took them at their word.

Then they changed their mind after 15 years.

Your general point about becoming accustomed to one's own privileges may be true, but the attitudes demonstrated in this article are so absurd, that they are far from typical examples of that trend. The article was one of the most ludicrous sob stories I have ever encountered.

I completely agree, in fact I would probably have the exact same reaction as this dude.

But I don't have half a million to spend on tickets, nor do I get to jetset across the oceans to buy flowers - nevertheless I will get to feel the externalities in form of climate change. So from that perspective, it looks different.

By this logic, any breach of contract involving a polluting activity is justified.

This is a dispute between a man who flies on climate-change-causing aircraft and the company that operates those airlines. So one could argue that by opening up his previously-paid-for seats to new paying customers, the airline becomes more profitable and contributes more to climate change.

Yes, I can't believe it but I'm actually sympathizing with the airline.

He booked fake reservations under fake names in case someone might want to travel with him. The fact no one at the airline asked him to stop committing fraud until 2004 does not lessen the fact he was, in fact, defrauding the airline out of thousands of dollars.

If he had just used the tickets as intended he'd probably still have his pass.

To be fair to the guy, he wasn't defrauding the airline. He bought lifetime tickets.

Any normally purchased ticket that isn't flown wouldn't be considered defrauding because you associate it with ongoing profit. The fact this guy paid an at-the-time-inflated $250k for a lifetime ticket should entitle him to book his tickets, as a portion of his lifetime ticket. The fact that, in hindsight, the airline is making a loss at this price, whether he flies or not, is not his fault.

He made up fake identities and booked tickets under their names in case someone might want to travel with him. Those empty seats, which most of the time he probably didn't even think would be used, cost the airline real money.

Yes, he had the right to reserve an extra seat but doing so under false pretenses is, in fact, fraud.

Despite what the estimable Prof. Green says in other comments it doesn't matter what airline employees encouraged him to do: it's up to you to know the terms of your agreement.

I am disgusted by the fact that I am actually defending airlines but again, if this guy wanted to preserve his cushy benefit he should have abided by the terms of his agreement.

Airlines don't sell a seat they sell the transportation between 2 airports (see their T&C's) to an individual. However ff you want an extra seat for extra-room there is a procedure (usually use "XS" as your middle name or ExtraSeat as a first name). He didn't do that, he created fake identities...

The question is whether he was advised to do so by the representatives of the airline.

He payed 250k for the pass, and 150k for the companion feature. I think the empty seats were fair, considering it nearly cost him double. AA just practiced this basic rule: make sure your customer/partner/citizens are always breaking some rule, so you can always get out of any deal.

The empty seats cost the airlines many thousands of dollars and most of the time he didn't even intend to use them.

I know airlines and cable companies are arguably the most vicious, anti-customer monopolists in America and it's hard to have sympathy for them, but was what this guy did against the rules? How can you argue creating fake identities and reserving seats for non-existing passengers is not?

As I mention in another comment, a contract is not a suicide pact. If you want your business partner to honor the terms of your agreement don't cost them tens of thousands of dollars unnecessarily.

99% of the time I am disgusted by airlines' behavior but in this case...passenger was at fault, IMO.

>> was what this guy did against the rules? How can you argue creating fake identities and reserving seats for non-existing passengers is not?

Because prior to purchasing the pass, he asked about having a non-human companion and AA offered up Yo-Yo Ma and his cello in a separate, reserved seat as an acceptable example. Because the CEO had written a personal letter thanking Mr. Rothstein and promising to continuing to honor the program. Because every non-human reservation he made was accepted and booked by an AA reservation agent -- not an internet booking or 3rd party travel agent.

Wait, do I understand your argument correctly? Fraud is acceptable because an AA reservation agent didn't realize the identity of the passenger was fake?

If I commit fraud against you, and you don't know it's fraud, it's your fault for you not immediately detecting it?

He was warned in 2004 against fake people, so he started using friends' names -- people who also didn't fly. He was terminated in 2008 after continuing to commit fraud, despite being warned.

>> do I understand your argument correctly?

No. My argument (one of my arguments) is that the company cannot change the definition of what it considers to be fraud after the contract is signed.

Prior to purchasing the pass, Mr. Rothstein asked if it was acceptable to use the companion seat for non-human passengers, i.e. just to keep his luggage. AA said it was ok, and it promoted Mr. Ma and his cello as an example of the practice. I am not privy to the logistics of how Mr. Ma books his cello's reservations, what name he uses when booking a seat for the cello, or how his situation differs from Mr. Rothstein's. In any case, post-purchase, AA changed its mind and decided that when Mr. Rothstein did this, it was fraud.

And the judge agreed with AA. I just happen to disagree with the company and the judge, based on its previous position on the matter.

>> you don't know it's fraud

But AA did know what he was doing. The reservation was named "Bag." Gate agents checked him and his bag (not a person) in, hundreds of times. The flight attendants, equipped with passenger manifests, also counted a non-person in order to match up, hundreds of times. And as stated above, he specifically asked about the practice, and was granted permission, before he even bought the pass.

The outline of what's allowable is what's written in the contract, not what some AA reservation agent tells him.

Again, if a bank teller says it's legal to rob the bank, and you rob the bank, are you off the hook? Of course not. The terms of the contract are...spelled out in the contract.

Even if AA tolerated it for a while, by 2004 it did not, and he kept up with his shenanagins despite being warned.

I generally despise airlines but this guy was in the wrong.

Except it absolutely was not written into the contract. The contract had a clause disallowing fraudulent use - but did not state or define what fraudulent use was.

So your position is every potential permutation of fraud must be explicitly enumerated or its allowed?

And that making up fake people and booking reservations he never intended to use does not comport with any definition of fraud?

That's not how contracts work.

It's OK to admit this guy defrauded the airline and violated the terms of his contract without liking airlines or their business practices.

The definition of fraud is: "an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage."

It seems that the airline (1) had full knowledge that these reservations were being made for a specific purpose, and (2) they had advised him to make this sort of reservation with full knowledge of its purpose, and (3) if they, at some point expressed a desire that the previously-allowed/recommended behavior should change, and it did subsequently change, and (4) they did not terminate the contract at any time when this "fraud" was actually occurring". I don't know all the details of the case, but based on this information I'm hard-pressed to accept the conclusion that it's fraud.

Or to put it differently: if I sign a contract with you that allows me to break the contract if (and only if) you commit fraud, and then I knowingly assist you in committing behavior that (unbeknownst to you) I will later claim is fraud, and then use this alleged fraud as an excuse to break the contract -- this is not a pattern of behavior that anyone should be cheering for.

Wait, Matthew D. Green? The famous cryptographer?

If a bank teller encourages me to rob the bank he works at, it doesn't mitigate the fact I robbed the bank. It doesn't give green lights to customers to rob banks.

I'd also encourage you to take a less anodyne view of contracts as immutable suicide pacts and more like a business arrangement that's beneficial to both parties. If the terms become too onerous companies aren't going to go bankrupt honoring them.

Besides, if he didn't commit fraud, why didn't the courts side with him?

And using legal loopholes to exit unfavorable contracts happens all the time in the real world, it's not some travesty of justice. Sounds like this guy got millions' worth of value for the 400K he spent, he should be happy he got what he did.

BTW love your work! Big fan.

>> If the terms become too onerous companies aren't going to go bankrupt honoring them.

Ironically, American Airlines didn't honor the contract, and did go bankrupt.

No US airline makes money over the long term, except Southwest and JetBlue. All would be out of business by now were it not for government intervention at various times.

> If a bank teller encourages me to rob the bank he works at, it doesn't mitigate the fact I robbed the bank. It doesn't give green lights to customers to rob banks.

No - but if the manager did it probably would (which is how red team pen tests work) because it falls under his remit. You could argue that an booking agent has the authority to advise customers on bookings..

The “I won’t be able to pick up flowers in Paris on my 70th birthday!” complaint was my favorite gem here. I was 100% unsympathetic to this family by the end of this read.

The guy paid $400k to American Airlines in 1987 money. American Airlines was begging people to buy these things. If I buy something from you, I expect to be able to use it. If I pay you a lot of money, I expect a lot of service.

If I pay you a lot of money, I expect a lot of service.

No matter how much money you pay, you're not entitled to a lot of service (whatever that means to you, personally). You're entitled to the service you purchased. There are many of these passes still active because the people who bought those passes didn't breach their contract

I'm not passing a huge amount of judgment on AA here. The world changed a lot in the 30 years since he bought the ticket, or more appropriately, signed the contract. The unit economics of flights in particular tightened so much that the terms of the original contract really needed adjustment.

What I will pass judgment on AA for is in not trying to work constructively towards a resolution. They claimed that he broke rules but the manner in which they dissolved the contract leaves a lot to be desired.

At the end of the day, this was a contract between a business and an ordinary mortal. Ordinary mortals don't have legal teams and dispute resolution processes. They get depressed and have limited attention spans.

AA should have either held up their end of the bargain or bought out his contract if it was no longer making financial sense. So it became a matter of litigation, further adding on to the cost.

> No matter how much money you pay, you're not entitled to a lot of service (whatever that means to you, personally). You're entitled to the service you purchased.

The service he purchased was "unlimited flights." In this case, by definition and by contract, he was literally entitled to "a lot of service."

It read like anything written by a narcissist. The first quarter is interesting but rather obvious. The last three-quarter is so full of it. These people have a very “specific” relationship with society...

> On the other hand, the whole article reeks of privilege, both by the rich-kid author and the guy. I

So what? Is that the guy had more privilege than you what's wrong? What about everyone that has less privilege than you?

> 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!

That's AA mistake and they are the ones paying for it.

> But beyond a miniscule, yet direct, contribution to climate change, someone who just flies across the ocean

Completely agree, but at the end it's AA that's doing theses damages and aren't compensating for them.

> On the other hand, the whole article reeks of privilege

So? What's wrong with privilege? You're talking about someone who signed a contract and paid for this privilege. That contract entitled him to use this privilege. It's understandable that he'd be upset when he lost it.

If you relied on a bus pass (unlimited privilege to use the bus) and the city took it away would you be upset?

If you rely on your car and the state took your driver's license away (unlimited privilege to drive) would you be upset?

What about your ISP cancelling your internet connection for using too much data?

You may scoff at these comparisons because they cost orders of magnitude less but it's exactly the same concept.

I gave up reading about half way through, my sympathy just gave out completely, for the reasons you mentioned.

There's an interesting angle here of what a "superpower" does to someone'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's hard for myself to imagine myself getting to the point where I think I'm that special, but I'm not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and/or privilege for decades it couldn't happen to me too.

> “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.”

Even his son says up front that he doesn't see what his dad was doing as such a sensational, extraordinary thing, that that description "doesn’t quite land," which is astonishing too.

I once had a superpower like this. I bought the Verizon Unlimited 4G internet plan before throttling or data caps were a thing in roughly 2010.

I had the Droid Razr Maxx and later Samsung Galaxy S5 with 1 5 dollar app that turned my phone into a hotspot (FoxFi) that the Verizon could neither detect, prevent, or charge extra for. I used 200+ GB's of blazing fast internet over the air for something like $50 a month for about 5 years.

It was an insanely good deal. The only rules were I was not allowed to make any modifications to the plan because it was taken off the market and I was considered "grandfathered" in. The "unlimited" plans of today are nothing like that plan was. They have data caps, are throttled, and traffic get reprioritized.

It was just as much a part of me as this ticket was for this gentleman (well not quite that much, but you get the point). Eventually Verizon just flat out upped the price to over $100 per month and it became unsustainable. Glorious while it lasted, sorely missed.

We have unlimited, uncapped 4G plans in Finland and probably most of Europe does.

well, Germany at least doesn't as far as I know. 20GB Telekom LTE at ~80EUR/m, after that it is throttled. They do offer an unlimited, while network neutrality bending, youtube/netflix unlimited streaming option.

PS: I stand corrected. https://www.telekom.de/unterwegs/tarife-und-optionen/smartph...

They do offer them now

Same in the UK ... Three UK does an unlimited sim-only plan for £20 a month which includes overseas roaming, including the US (but not Canada), albeit you're limited to 12GB a month when overseas, which is still a great deal.

I don't listen to DAB radio anymore in my car as it's mono and sounds awful, I use the various radio station apps and have far fewer drop outs than with DAB to boot in addition to the far greater audio quality.

Looking at my usage for the last month I've used well over 50GB.

Home broadband tends to be unlimited as well, I'm on a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up cable connection and regularly transfer 2TB+ in a month when working from home, and nary a peep from my provider.

Given the capacity constraints of an LTE air medium, try torrenting multiple 85GB 2160p60 hevc copies of Blu-ray movies for a whole month, or just seeding debian dvd iso images, and see how long your unlimited plan remains live...

I'm doing that. Fewer torrents (still some), more large files (training data, databases, raw media) or large collections of small files (e.g. Backblaze backups). My monthly data usage for the SIM I used for my home connection is (this month) 809.26 GB, with 6.79 TB so far this year. If I get a drop in speed or network degradation, I can more or less rely on my provider to fix that within a week, if the issue is with the base stations I connect to. This is a fully supported use case for the plan I'm on.

At least in Germany there are practically no such plans. Maybe one or two, but it's with problematic provides and are very very expensive.

The three major providers (Telekom, Vodafone, O2) now have real unlimited plans. It's around 80€, which is expensive, but not excessively so. We generally have far more expensive plans in Germany than anywhere else in Europe, which really sucks. The unlimited plans were first introduced at the end of last year if I recall correctly.

telekom and vodafon cap at 100gig and O2 was just found to be cancelling contracts with "abusive use" ...

At least Telekom doesn't. I have an unlimited plan and use the three SIM cards for my home internet, my phone, and my iPad. Combined, I have hundreds of GB per month of traffic I use. I have the Magenta Business XL plan (not actually a business plan). It's LTE Max, so I get about 250MBps down, 50 up in Berlin. The same unlimited LTE traffic is now available as an 80EUR plan. Although to get to the same feature level (multi-sim, free international calls), I'd end up paying >100 again anyway.

Just looked at my home internet stats, that connection alone had 115.42 GB of download traffic over the past 5 days.

Ah, that really sucks. I don't understand why the mobile provider landscape is so fucking terrible in Germany.

For comparison, I have an unlimited plan from Telia (Finland) with network speeds up to 200Mbit/s on 4G, no data caps and 15GB of roaming "EU-data" for 23.90€/mo.

Man, I'd kill for that kind of plan. I spent a year in Austria ages ago, and even they have substantially cheaper plans that still had higher data caps than German ones.

Not with unlimited tethering though, right?

A Finn here. Tethering is not limited either.

One example: https://tuki.dna.fi/org/dna-en/d/dna-rajaton-prepaid-support...

In some cases, yes. In fact, one of the Irish mobile operators currently has an all-you-can-eat prepay sim top-up promotion that gives you unlimited 4g data for €20 every 28 days.

They have a fair usage policy but don't enforce it (no idea why) and chatting with their pricing personnel it makes no economic sense (they lose money on it). It would appear it's a sacrifice they are currently willing to make to ensure market share increases.

Yep, I have this and often just teather up piles of people. Never have to think about usage. Now that I mention teathering, I don't think there are any Irish service providers who attempt to monitor or regulate teathering, which is nice.

Lithuania here, unlimited from cellphone operator for around 29 eur/mo, I don't see anything forbidding tethering, I know you can ask for a data-only clone of your SIM to put in your car or laptop. You can get a better deal from the operator that specializes in 4g internet only if you are within coverage.

Latvia: 20 eur/mo, very fast uncapped 4G, no limitations whatsoever.

Uk here, yes, I have a truly unlimited plan including tethering. We used it as our main house connection for three months when we moved into our house, while the 250/20 main line was being fitted very slowly. I pay around £20 per month.

Cellphone usage prices in the US are absolutely mad compared to most of the rest of the world. In the UK I have unlimited 4G, calls and texts for £15 per month. I also get that while abroad in something like 50 countries, including the US.

The US is a lot less dense than the UK. Whenever people complain about fiber internet or mobile in America, I try and remind them that the subscribers in urban centers are subsidizing those in rural areas.

Finland has half the population density of US. Unlimited, cheap, fast plans with no tethering limitations.

I've got an unlimited, uncapped 4g Sprint account for $15 a month in the high desert of SoCal, mergers are great sometimes.

Nice. Which parent company did you get the plan from?

I am among the few who bought Sprint's $15 Kickstart plan during the two weeks it was available last year. It's not as nice as yours—there is a 50GB cap before deprioritization (not throttling [1]) occurs, and I presume yours allows for hotspot—but an unlimited plan for $15 is amazing, even if on the Sprint network.

I'd heard that Sprint is good about honoring grandfathered plans. Your experience further encourages me that $15 Kickstart will continue through the T-Mobile acquisition.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sprint/comments/ax989h/is_sprint_ki...

> Even his son says

The article is by his daughter Caroline.

>but I'm not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and/or privilege for decades it couldn't happen to me too.

Precisely, and that is the 'secret' of money, its mystery ans "phantom-like objectivity". A famous German philosopher once wrote,

"That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has [In the manuscript: ‘is’. – Ed.] power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?"

I liked the quote, and went on to find the source [1]. Must say it surprised me: [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...

Another curious facet in the link is the reference to Shakespeare; he was quite the fan of his works and performed mock plays with his daughters if I'm correct.

This is the story of typically bad business decision of offering anything "unlimited".

I just cancelled my account with the vendor of "unlimited" 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.

Whenver you see "unlimited" or "unlimted forever" - question this. If nothing else - ride the wave but don't expect it to be "unlimited" or "forever".

This. Don't try to win against whoever you do business with, look for arrangements where both sides can get their needs well catered for. If it looks like you are winning what the other is losing, there must be something hidden that you can't see, likely something big and important (like e.g. the insurance being exceptionally good at finding reasons for not paying). If it looks kind of balanced, there is at least a chance that the impression is not misleading.

I once saw an ISP in Thailand advertising "unlimited speed": https://imgur.com/a/Gcl6JTF

It could mean that the speed is uncapped to what the physical medium and the current network congestion allows.

Supermarket chain Lidl had a promotion over a decade ago where they sold Air Berlin flights for 20€, the vouchers could be exchange for open seats in any flight for a year after the promotion was on.

I bought dozens of them, and basically spent a whole year travelling for essentially nothing, and like the author in the story giving away air tickets on a whim.

Backblaze seems to have made a business model out of unlimited cloud backup for a single computer.

They do it by building their own super high capacity, super low cost storage pods, deduplicating data and relying on the fact that most people don't have multiple TB of data on their personal computers.

And by refusing to offer a Linux version of their backup tool, which would be a totally logical thing to do, given their apparent focus on tech-savvy customers (just look at how and where they advertise). Tech-savvy people use Linux on their machines far more often than the average customer, So supporting it would be a no-brainer.

But people also tend to use Linux on machines with lots of disk space, like home servers. Wouldn't it be nice if those could backup their 30TB locally attached storage with the unlimited plan? Nope, not for Backblaze, which is why they shy away from Linux and try to get Linux users to buy their pay-per-Gigabyte plan (for which they miraculously are able to provide Linux support...).

Indeed - having a huge NAS that all of your home computers back up to, which then backs up to Backblaze would be an obvious workaround for buying multiple licenses ... although why go to that trouble when it's $6 a month per computer? That's one fancy coffee.

"Your external hard drives need to be connected to your computer and scanned by Backblaze at least once every 30 days in order to keep them backed up"

-- Backblaze

In other words - instead of backing up your data - backblaze may delete it unless you read and understand their fine print.

I'd never deal with provider sneaking in such a nonsense behind loud claims of "unlimited anything"

They email you repeatedly if they haven't seen your drive for at least 14 days warning of this.

This guy was clearly abusing the program.

"...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."

Booked 3,009 flight segments in ~42 months. That's 17 flights a week, or 2.4 a day. He was basically using the companion pass to reserve empty seats.

Did American screw up by not having better usage guidelines? Yes. Did this guy take clear advantage of this program with bad faith? Yes.

Bad faith? How many of those cancelled tickets were just re-booked for an earlier/later flight, or a day later?

The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties for flight changes is because, if it were free or cheap to do so, everybody would constantly be adjusting their travel arrangements. Almost every airline trip I book, by the time it actually comes, I wish I could take a slightly different flight time or day.

>> 17 flights a week So what? Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?

>> The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties...

Scheduling and logistics is a perfectly good reason for having these expectations. Airlines have horrible margins (< 10%) in even good years, and fuel and staff isn't free. Planning is kind of a big deal in an industry like this, and you can't do that if everything is last minute.

>> Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?

He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse. Maybe 10%? Sure.20%? Pushing it, but I could see that in special circumstances. Once you're cancelling 5-6x more flights than you're actually going on, there's a problem.

Changing/cancelling a 2-day-old reservation 6 months out -- not "last minute" -- has a negligible cost. However, AA will still charge a non-elite customer $200. If you could prove that the majority of Mr. Rothstein's cancellations were made within a week, even a month, of the actual flight, perhaps I'd agree with you, but that data is not available to us, and his daughter inferred that many tickets were cancelled within a day or two.

You are using AA's chosen nomenclature against Mr. Rothstein. Was he truly "cancelling" or just changing the date/time/stopover most of these times (which AA would call a cancel/re-issue)? What about changing his seat at the gate -- the agent rips up the boarding pass and issues a new one. Is that considered a cancellation? If I was in court trying to amplify percentages to disparage someone, I'd probably say it was.

> He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse.

I just want to chime in here and point out that the exit clause in the contract required fraudulent usage. American was certainly getting royally screwed by the deal they made, and the pattern of Rothstein's reservations and cancellations was certainly not normal. But what took thousands of billable hours for lawyers to resolve seems to be specifically whether his behavior rose to the level of fraud.

So what? There was no abuse clause, and abuse is not fraud.

> Bad faith?

"Bag Rothstein"

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Booking tickets under fake names, whether for your luggage or for random people you may meet at the airport and want to travel with, is fraud. Full stop.

Fraud requires you to deceive people. If AA tell you to book under a fake name for the spare seat, you do it, and then they cheerfully watch you walk on with whoever, that's not fraud. They know exactly what's happening.

an AA phone operator is not the same as an AA legal representative. they can make mistakes.

> If AA tell you

besides, the sentence touches explicitly on this claim

" paragraph 17(d) of the AAirpass Agreement is clear: “American’s failure to enforce any of its rights under this Agreement shall not constitute a waiverof such rights,” "

which is pretty much standard if you ask me. tolerance doesn't constitute acceptance and there was a warning about this, which he tried worked around using real names of relatives that then didn't travel for the vast majority of bookings, making further claim of ignorance tenuous at best and dubious in general.

Wait, was there a bad faith guideline in the deal they offered. I mean I understand a little almost broke company like American can't afford this stuff, so hard decisions had to be made and deals they entered in with customers were broken just to stay afloat. It wasn't like they have $44.724B in annual revenues or anything that you might say - those guys have the wherewithal to honor the stupid agreements they make with customers.

Did you catch the fact that it wasn’t his idea to start doing that and that they never told him not to do so?

This guy was a stockbroker, not some random barista. He knew what he wanted and how to ask for it. Trying to pretend that travel agents did this all on his behalf and he's just a poor victim is naive.

If I ask airline personnel to book me an empty seat on my free ticket and they say ‘sure sir, no problem!’ what exactly am I supposed to think went wrong?

If I have a $500,000 golden ticket that I’ve built my entire identity and life around, I’m not going to trust some random ticket agent who’s just trying to get me off the phone.

He didn't deal with random ticket agents. Lifetime pass holders call a dedicated number just for them. Those answering knew who he was and he knew them by name.

If you have the American Express Black Card, sure. These customers were handled by the standard Executive Platinum team.

Per the article, he very much knew all the personnel by name, to the point of sending them gifts and calling his "friends" to talk about anything and everything when feeling depressed.

Are you sure? I've been AirPass before and we book through different agents. Same when ConciergeKey wasn't a published benefit.

He didn't place his trust in ticket agents (though his were far from random). He had a handwritten letter from CEO Robert Crandall: "I am delighted that you’ve enjoyed your AAirpass investment — you can count on us to keep the Company solid, and to honor the deal, far into the future."

The CEO wrote him a letter saying, “Sure, go ahead and book an empty seat for your suitcase under the name Bag Rothstein”? Because if not, it sure sounds like he put his trust in ticket agents.

I mean, I wouldn’t trust a ticket agent to manage my finances, but you kind of have to assume they know how to do the one thing they were hired to.

Just different risk tolerances I guess. If I had spent $500k on something that could be worth $10+ million, I wouldn't take a risk based on the word of a front-desk person.

My belief is that this guy truly knew he was in the wrong and did it anyway because he thought he could get away with it. Classic rich guy move that came back to bite him.

Aside from the booking staff, who could he reasonably have expected to advise him? The only people who could actually say if AA considered this behavior abusive would be members of the airline's legal staff of senior management. Any other attorney or other form of advisor can't possibly definitely state what AA would consider abuse.

These aren't random front-desk booking agents, they're high up enough in the chain of command to deal with customers like the unlimited pass holders. Who else could he have trusted to tell him if the behavior would constitute fraud in America's opinion?

Well the people so far up in the chain of command clearly advised him incorrectly so that argument doesn’t hold water.

Again, if I’m risking $5+ million I FIND SOMEONE TO ADVISE ME. Dude’s a Bear Stearns trader with money to burn, you’re telling me he has no way to get ahold of the airline’s legal staff or senior management?

And also again, the reason this guy took their word for it is that he knew he was angle-shooting and thought it wouldn’t come back to bite him.

The legal requirements for a party to make an adverse decision is low, it just has to be non-arbitrary to prevent it from being judged on the merits. At which point whichever party has the greater resources would be most likely to win.

When dealing with a corporation, you are at their mercy, and the most immediate defense is whatever PR problems you can cause them.

Of course, that was during a time when a promise like that still meant something. And by the time they decided to renege he was long gone.

A few things to consider. If he had turned up to all of those flights there is the exact same financial situation for the airline as if he cancels at the very last moment, so him cancelling or not showing up is not an issue. The airline didn't complain that he booked too many flights. What would be an issue is if he double-booked flights, so there would be one he couldn't turn up to at all, this would be screwing the airline and bad faith. If he had done this he would have to know he would be inconveniencing the airline. The court case didn't bring this up and I would presume if they're willing to pull out specifics like the aforementioned cancellations, then they would jump at showing he double-booked flights. This leads me to believe he never did this, so he always intended to take the flights or at least wanted the opportunity available for him to take them, which really you should be able to with an unlimited ticket like that.

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.

But I'm sure cancelling these passes reduced expenses-- at least on paper.

They’re the same issue as pensions - liabilities that can’t be funded because there is no theoretical upper bound (even if there is a practical one). An absolute nightmare for bean counters.

Well, there's got to be a dollar amount that it's worth to them to have fully funded liabilities, and if it's as high as you seem to be saying then I'm pretty sure they could have gone to an investment bank or insurer or something and gotten them to write a custom product to cap their liability. I thought a good part of investment banking business consisted of corporate finance deals to shift miscellaneous risks like this off their clients' books.

My guess is that it's just the sheer cost that American balked at, not the uncertainty in exactly how much he would cost them.

One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year.

With so many pointless flights, I can't even wrap my head around his environment foot print.

actually: https://www.google.com/search?q=fuel+use+per+flight+per+pers...

that said, burning jet fuel is substantially worse for the environment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...

> One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year.

Do you have a link on this? I've tried to look up numbers on this multiple times in the past, but reliable numbers have been hard to come by, especially for recent years. The ones I recall said that trans-continental flights in the US use something like 1/5 of a year's worth of car emissions, not a whole year's worth.

Using these numbers: https://theicct.org/publications/transatlantic-airline-fuel-... , which shows ~34 pax-km/l efficiency

and the fact that a Prius does ~40 km/l, a plane flight, per-passenger, does about as well as a single-occupancy vehicle for each passenger travelling the same distance. The environmental trouble really comes from the fact that it is easy to fly long distances. It is ~7400 miles from SFO to Sydney, so a round-trip really does burn about as much gas as a year's worth of single-occupancy automobile driving.

The article states that the person in question flew at least 30,000,000 miles. That is, in carbon terms, assuming a 2017 aircraft, equivalent to driving around the world at least ~1200 times in a single-occupancy vehicle.

I think the 40 km/l is unrealistic -- that's 95 mpg. Your average car is apparently(?) under a quarter of that, 22 mpg [3]. Although I feel like this is probably a low-ball (possibly old) figure? My guess would've been like 30 mpg, but I don't know how much of the population has a new car.

The source I had was [1] which said a plane emits ~0.9 tons of CO2/person/round-trip, whereas the average car emits ~4.6 tons/year [2]. At 1.7 persons/car [3] that's 2.7 tons CO2/person/year. Now interestingly, I can't seem to see a source for the 0.9-ton figure; I do see some other sites [4] that claim a one-way flight of that distance emits 2.8 tons, which is a 6x difference... I'm not sure which one is accurate. But there's another site [5] quoting a similar figure to the 0.9 tons.

So funny enough I'm kinda back where I'm started... not sure what the right figure is to even 5x...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

[3] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf

[4] https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/carbon-offsets

[5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/if-you-travel-and-care...

>My guess would've been like 30 mpg, but I don't know how much of the population has a new car. //

I just ditched a 15yo 7 seater (Opel/Vauxhall Zafira) with engine troubles (burning a lot of oil - maybe a piston compression problem; leaking exhaust manifold), and having a roofbox, and it was still doing 34mpg (UK; that's 15km/l) with primarily short journeys.

Newer cars must do 40mpg as a minimum, surely?

Newer cars tend to be larger and heavier than older cars, which does not help fuel efficiency.

For the US specifically, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/03/climate/us-fu... says that in 2016 new "cars and light trucks (i.e. SUVs)" in the US average 24.7 mpg. Based on the charts, restricting to just cars gives you something like 36mpg in the US in 2016. Note that the EU number is much higher at ~46mpg, likely due to the cars being on average smaller.

Though I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the charts seem to show both cars _and_ light trucks at above 25mpg for the US in 2016; hard to reconcile that with the 24.7 number.

Also see the note about how SUVs and vans are considered "cars" in the EU but "light trucks" in the US...

Anyway, the upshot is that it's certainly possible to get something that will get you over 40mpg, but the average is below that even for new vehicles, in the US.

I doubt the airplane flew just for him... At worst he added maybe 200 pounds of extra weight.

Planes glide, and also there are hundreds of people moved at once. Still I doubt your numbers.

Planes are also moving at roughly 10x driving speeds and air resistance is roughly relative to second power of speed. And they climb to 10 km for the trip. At this kind of numbers gut feeling is guaranteed to go wrong.

Heard about the AAirpass from Mark Cuban who calls it one of the best things he's ever bought. If I had 250k to spend on one, I'd definitely do it too. There's something magical about being able to point to a place on the globe and get there in hours and apparently there's still a few valid ones out there.

A few years ago I thought the same. These days Flugscham/Flygskam should stop you from flying everywhere, all the time.

Yet another worthless article lamenting the fact that an immensely privileged person had a minor inconvenience to their lifestyle.

It's not exactly something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", as according to the HN guidelines - obsessing over the idle rich is not an intellectual pursuit.

Reminds me of Max-Hervé George and his fund investment contract:

http://archive.is/jkb0x

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?

Anything with a “lifetime” option is worth evaluating. I’ve come out way ahead on plans that are pricey up-front but easily pay off longer-term if you plan to remain a user of that service or product.

Yes. The only risk is the potential bankruptcy or revoking of life time privileges. Otherwise it’s often a good deal.

The decent thing to do would have been to give him a warning first, before they suddenly revoked the pass.

Interesting read, one note:

> 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.

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'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?

People's luggage goes to the wrong city all the time, thanks to mistakes by airlines or baggage handlers. The policy is that the passenger can't book his luggage on one flight and then opt not to take it, not that they will never take unaccompanied luggage.

Cool good to know, I just remember hearing something like that on an episode of Air Crash Investigation so it jumped out at me.

I thought that it was the other way around, that if you checked in the bags and never made it to the flight, then the flight has to be stopped.

Isn't that what I said? :)

He checked in his bags, but didn't get on the plane, which then took off with his bags on board.

> taking away something integral to who he was.

Uhh... so flying at a very discounted rate was integral to who he was? His identity? That seems a bit much. I'm finding it hard to sympathise with this guy, although AA sold a "lifetime" ticket, so that was their mistake and they should honour it. If it had turned out to have made them money instead, they'd happily continue. They made a miscalculation, that's on them.

Did they terminate other people's tickets? The interesting article does mention booking the extra seat and not using it.

A number of other people have their tickets terminated for similar reasons. Google the name of the program to find their stories

I feel this is the dystopia we are heading to.

Not some big brother.

Not some soma magic happy pill.

But rather a convoluted mess of 'user agreements' - 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.

If I took the money of a corporation and then reneged on providing what I promised at the time of billing, I'd get sued to death, and even imprisoned.

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.

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't see theft if it is done by the powerful, it becomes 'enforcement of rules', or 'use of tips to pay services', or 'creation of accounts to increase fees', or 'forfeiture of funds'.

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's dollars) and was looking for any way possible to cancel their obligations once this didn't play out as hoped.

Previous AAirpass thread (2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802751.

I think there were others?

I'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?

> Where is the loss?

In the many multiples of millions of dollars the ticket would have saved him over the next 30-40 years?

The fact that something the airline sold was a terrible idea doesn’t make it right to suddenly take it away.

And to be honest, if literally every action taken by him was actually proxied through AA employees, and nobody said anything. I can’t really see why they would have any ground to stand on in regards to cancelling the ticket.

He built a strong emotional relationship with the employees and then got cut off, abruptly, at the airport, with them not only unwilling to let him board his flight but unwilling to help him get his luggage back.

On top of that, they wouldn’t tell him why (at the time).

This was his life for many years. Emotionally it must have been similar to showing up at home one day and discovering your wife had locked you out and filed for divorce with absolutely no warning, and you had no idea what happened.

The pass supposed to last for lifetime, it doesn't matter if he got more value during the time he had it, they took something very very valuable from the man, its easy to see the emotional trauma it caused.

People often feel emotional trauma when they're reneged on or sued. It doesn't necessarily have to be done by a person for the victim to feel betrayed. I'm thinking of Uzi Nissan, the owner of Nissan Computers, who is still getting sued by Nissan Motors to turn over nissan.com to them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he feels a certain emotional pain about all that.

I'm also finding it difficult to empathize with the trauma. Seems like he traveled to Agra, India, so he must have met people that are not only below the flight line, but that will not and cannot leave a 10km circle for the rest of their lifes.

Personally, I have bound with people below the flight line and ever since I cherish every flight I take, although it's in economy class and I have to pay for it.

I have empathy for the loss of his son. The pain of ticket loss is harder for me to feel but I get it that people grow accustomed to their place no matter what level and a sudden fall will hurt and bring on depression even if where they land is actually better than 90% of the rest of the population.

It’s a broken promise. How can it be justified that the company takes its promise back?

Because of the dissonance vs expectations.

I agree he got his money worth out of American Airlines many many times over, so he should just accept it and pony up for airfare like everybody else now. From the article it seems like he can afford it, previously working at Bears Sterns and being able to afford $250k for the initial unlimited pass.

Plus, there was a clause in the contract about fraudulent use, and it certainly seems he was using it fraudulently booking empty first class seats for his luggage and such.

I don't know, he took a lot of risk that the company would continue to operate over decades. Should early investors of unicorn startups forfeit their equity after getting a fixed multiple of their investment in dividends?

That is a perfectly resonable position to take - if American Airlines was also renegging on things like stock agreements, they'd have a internally consistent point, abeit one few people would agree with. This is just naked fraud though.

Hit the nail on the head. A deal is a deal, regardless of what kind of utilization there was.

Except if you break the terms of the contract (fraudulent bookings), which is alluded to in the post.

Yet the terms never said that what he was doing was considered fraudulent, and they'd known for years he was doing it. It's not like the people who were letting other people use their passes, which is clearly fraudulent. This is ambiguous at best. He was doing something regular first class passengers do all the time, perfectly legitimately: booking extra seats for bags/space/etc, or changing plans at the last minute. Nobody told him this wasn't allowed.

This is a typical HN comment. People here always seem to think that laws in contracts are like code, with strict rules and consequences.

It was ruled that his use was fraudulent, so it was, that's the end of it.

You cannot use a contract like a strict rule, bend it in the "ambiguous zone" and think nothing will happen. Contracts are broken all the time.

He may have respected the letter of the contract, but not the spirit, and that is enough to end the contract without compensation.

Similar cases happen very frequently. I remember a case of somebody using his unlimited internet access to run a server, and getting his contract canceled because his use was comparable to a business use, even if the server was not part of any business and the internet subscription never explicitly prevented such use.

He might have a case based on the fact that AA not only knew about his bookings, but actually assisted him in every one of them, without ever warning him.

If they tolerate and assist something like this for a long time, the clause forbidding it may become invalid, depending on the situation, similar to customary law situations.

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.

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