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Comment by JusticeJuice | Hacker News Reader

I spent $600 on a flight from London, to San Diego. There's a stopover in New York - but the connecting flight is delayed for six hours. At this point it's 10pm, but they get a plane, we board, we're actually taxing to the runway... and then the flight is canceled. Turns out it would arrive too late in San Diego for noise regulation. We all get off, I get another flight with a different company next thing in the morning.

Few days later I hit them up for a refund on the canceled flight. They're happy to refund the NY to SD leg... to a tune of $24. Turns out their internal valuation of a $600 flight is $576 for the first 8h, then $24 for the last 6h. Lol. JetBlue man.

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If you're "departing from an airport in the UK on any airline" then I'm pretty sure the legal minimum compensation is more than that:

* https://www.caa.co.uk/passengers/resolving-travel-problems/d...

It sounds a bit confusing as to whether you were cancelled or delayed, or accepted an offer etc. but I wouldn't accept $24...

I was just so over it, I took the $24 and treated it as a lesson. I talked to a manager, but I couldn't be fucked doing more than that - I wasn't strapped for cash. If I was in my home turf, with a legal system I knew maybe I'd fight it more, but I was a tourist.

> with a legal system I knew maybe I'd fight it more

For future reference, Airhelp will fight it for you [1].

[1] https://www.airhelp.com/en/

A private company startup to protect consumer rights from other private companies? Easily most American thing I've seen this week.

> most American thing I've seen

I'll let their Berlin-based team know :).

Flew BCN to SFO with a stopover in Philly. Short ~10 min delay on the tarmac rerouting around a storm in the midwest. Flight is abruptly cancelled, the combination of the delay and the very slightly longer route caused the pilots to time out. AA refused a refund because they classified it as weather and they have no responsibility for the fact that their pilots had 20 minutes of buffer in how long they were allowed to fly, and no other pilots were available.

My credit card comes with insurance for this, but I've been going back and forth with Visa's process for this since July and still haven't gotten reimbursed.

File a complaint under the European rules. It should be much easier.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

Did they not offer to rebook you? I've never had an airline not offer to rebook someone at the airline's expense for an airline-canceled flight, whether in the US or Europe.

As an aside, originally written as a response to a now-deleted comment about noise regulations that shouldn't excuse your compensation situation at all:

> The airport in San Diego is abnormally close to the downtown area more than virtually any other major airport in the US or Europe, barring dedicated urban airports like London City. To paint a picture, while landing there it feels like you're flying between skyscrapers, and that's probably actually the case. If there's any commercial airport that should have noise/time regulations, SAN is probably up there on the list.

> I've never had an airline not offer to rebook someone at the airline's expense for an airline-canceled flight

I have. Even after 3 hours on the phone. For a flight booked months in advance, and canceled 20 hours before departing. They kept finding flights, and then saying they needed to get them approved by their supervisor, which was rejected 3 times. I assume they decided that the lost tickets would be too expensive and would rather just screw me.

I had to file a chargeback with my credit card to even get a refund (after 2 months), and I'm currently using a legal service which is in the process of suing American Airlines to get the statutory standard compensation for canceled flights in the EU. They simply ignored my (and the legal service's) requests for such.

They were happy to rebook me on a flight from NY to SD, but I had a speaking event to get to, and they had no free seats available to get me there in time - so rebooking wasn't very helpful. So I coughed up for a Delta flight early next morning.

And nah, the noise regulation was never suggested to be a reason for bad compensation. As a foreigner I've never seen people flip their shit so much in public - like the plane staff (attendants, pilot etc) clearly had no part in the flight getting canceled, and were so apologetic - but people were yelling, swearing at them, it was pure fucking anarchy.

At that point I had been up 27h, I just walked away, bought my morning flight. Found a hotel that was open (it was past midnight), took a cooked 2h subway ride into NY, slept for 4h, took 2h subway back, got my flight, presented. Honestly my biggest regret in the whole experience was just not choosing to sleep at the airport on the ground. Lol.

"My internal valuation for the London to NY leg is $0.01, and NY to San Diego is $9999.99, which coincidentally is the damages limit for small claims court. Now let's be reasonable and work this out without a judge".

Wonder if you could add the last 9 mill: $9999.999

That's unsurprising. It's likely the ticket from London - NY was $576 (often domestic legs are added on nearly for free, and on occasion even cheaper than without for reasons that I don't understand).

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