Comment by jpcooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpcooper | Hacker News Reader

Travel cancellation insurance is a thing that exists. It would be nice to see a travel cancellation insurance product which pays out based on the following automatically and easily verifiable outcomes:

1. Customer turns up.

2. Plane leaves within a certain range around scheduled time.

3. Plane arrives at destination.

4. Plane arrives at destination within a certain range around the scheduled time.

5. The price of the trip.

6. Weather events make things difficult.

Airlines could either integrate or not.

Maybe the premiums would have to be higher due to a higher occurrence of payouts, but maybe they wouldn't have to be so high due to the number of claims processing people you now do not have to employ.

Maybe I am oversimplifying.

The EU has strict rules around exactly this. If the flight is outside the rules, you submit the paperwork and wait for a response. I've done this 5 times the last year and won more than the flight cost, even those times I received a hotel and replacement flight. It makes EU flight planners very careful, I imagine, due to the expense of losing an entire flight income and more.

The author seems not to have been able to claim what he should under these rules.

Yes I wrote earlier, I had a similar problem that I won on. I think it was bad luck and worth pursuing further.

I did eventually get compensation, the details are in the "Closure" section at the end of the post.

Bad reading comprehension on my part. Was it under the EU rules, or something else?

EU rules - the solicitors threatened court action, easyJet caved. I think that's the fundamental difference between the first service I used (who went to the ADR) and the second, who say they have handled > 100,000 cases so know when to treaten court action (and clearly had automated most of the process).

The author is misinterpreting the rules by considering his delay a cancellation, which has a different compensation structure.

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