My father had a lifelong ticket to fly anywhere. Then they took it away | Hacker News Reader

My father had a lifelong ticket to fly anywhere. Then they took it away

theguardian.com

18 pointsgaisturiz10 comments

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20510933

I have mixed feelings about this. It's clearly a wealthy guy being written about by his privileged daughter and he was was pretty reckless in using his unlimited pass. Entitled, maybe. It's hard to have much empathy. He missed 84% of his booked flights. That's a huge amount, and he did the same for his companion pass. He said himself that the pass had paid for itself for how much he flew so it's not exactly like AA is taking advantage of some middle class nobody that spent a significant chunk of their lifetime income on this.

Still, AA was shitty in their response. It was dumb of AA to offer this to begin with. And the author's dad was clearly struggling with depression, substance abuse, and grief.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I guess I just find the eccentric details of the lives of the wealthy to be tiresome to read about.

edit: I guess this is a dupe and these thoughts were all already expressed in old version

So missing 84% of booked flights is not like a big deal on scale the size of American. Notably because the seat just will just open up for someone else to sit in. Either the plane leaves full of passengers or it doesn't. It was also pretty common practice to overbook flights starting in the 2000's.

As to the confusion of self with your airline status, I would say it's pretty bad if you were able to fly anywhere for free especially for 20 years, and then lost that ability. However, it just means you would pay for flights, which seems like something fairly easy to get over, especially if you're wealthy.

As long as they refund him with interest I'd say it was fair-ish.

to be honest, if someone is sold a 'lifelong pass', it should be lifelong, regardless of the status of the individual, it's a fraud to give him anything less.

if they found at the end it was a mistake to give out such tickets, that's their problem ,not the end user's problem.

in light of fraud of the user, for example giving the lifelong pass to use by other individuals (obviously not the intended purpose of the thing) i could expect it to be withdrawn. but that would only apply if these limitations were clearly stated or noted on the purchase.

I bought "lifetime hosting" from Joyent. They cancelled the deal after about seven years, then fobbed us off onto a spinoff shell company that imploded even before it launched.

I see deals all the time for VPN companies selling "lifetime subscriptions." Always have to remember it's talking about the lifetime of the company, not the customers.

I'd love to know what the average length of those ends up being. A year? Three? Looking at you, FastestVPN, KeepSolid VPN, VPNSecure, SaferVPN, Ivacy VPN, VPN Unlimited, VeePN, etc.

It'd be more believable if they'd offer bargains on a multi-year subscription. Selling a lifetime subscription to something with operating costs reeks of "We're going to run out of money, how can we scrape some funds together and keep afloat a little longer? We'll deal with long term consequences later if we haven't gone bankrupt."

For the curious:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Textdrive

OT but is it just me or algolia down today? I tried a search earlier and just now clicked your link. I'm getting...

We're sorry — something's gone wrong. Our team has been notified and will look into resolving this issue! Go back to home page

When something's too good to be true ....

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