Chief Lying Officer - A lie should make you look better, not worse.

I saw two comments when I clicked the comment link:

TWAndrews: I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."

Symmetry: I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?

My dad was a pilot (between "Commercial" and "General Aviation"). The first comment, I thought: "Well, that's why the airlines lie about this sort of thing". The second: "If there isn't a regulation in place, and companies were more transparent about this sort of thing, there'd be enough anger to result in a regulation".

I recall a huge uproar a while back because of an airline having an unusual number of weather delays, which (at the time, not sure if this is still true) meant that they had no responsibility to pay for passengers lodging.

Here's the thing: The few customers who are very regular travelers manage to squeak out a voucher (they either know how to hack the system or can rely on their platinum status) and the infrequent remaining, especially leisure, travelers are angry and vow never to fly with that airline again. The problem is, if you work for a reasonably large company that has a Corporate Bookings/Travel department, you are not the airline's customer. At my company, if I travel, I am required to take the least expensive flight as determined by our booking system or travel agency service with very little wiggle room. If I want a direct flight (and I always do), where I live, it's guaranteed to be the same airline 90% of the time. I'm glad for this, I don't mind that one airline, but the other 10% of the time it's an airline I positively hate. In addition, the booking systems prices are almost always more what I can find doing a simple search on my own (I had a flight that would have cost $400 via Expedia but the least I could find on our booking service was $1400).

On top of all of that, one of the prime reasons we use a custom booking service is because they include a custom company hotline for sorting out these exact problems. I'm not going to say "conflict of interest", because their customer service division worked out a huge mess at 1:00 AM involving a missed flight and later missing luggage that saved me having to stay an additional several days a small town in Montana, but all of this ends up making the person the airline answers to either the booking service or the applicable federal regulation. Neither are my top choice.

I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."

Or we could simply start treating consumers like Adults. I would prefer the honest truth even if I didn't like it, to a lie that defers my emotions onto unrelated targets.

I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?

This is great stuff. I've often encountered corporate lies like this, which caused me to wonder, "Ok, I get that they feel they need to lie to me. But couldn't they at least tell a lie that doesn't blatantly insult my intelligence or make them look like bigger idiots than necessary? Aren't they smart enough to do that, if they are smart enough to figure out the need to lie?"