A Check-In Agent’s Mistake Made Me Miss an Antarctic Cruise and I’m Out $17,000

With all the added stress, emotional difficulties, and all the work and resources needed to deal with this, it’s hardly a victory to just get back what was taken from you unjustly.

We just added something like 85,000 federal employees to shake down our citizens for more sheckes. Yet there’s nothing in place to come down on a mega corporation to pay what they owe? Instead you have to go toe to toe with their teams of highly paid lawyers?

This is modern America. It’s just an endless cycle of getting screwed over and celebrating when we lose because we could have lost so much more.

> I’d like American to acknowledge in writing that they made a mistake and use that to ask Aurora to reconsider and to file an appeal to Trip Mate.

Of all the classes people say high schools should offer (and others point out will be wasted on high schoolers - a perennial online debate), I think a course covering basic legal rights and remedies would be one with the greatest, easily-accessible value. (And perhaps the course can also cover reading contracts, so that valueless "travel insurance" won't be so popular.)

Basic, common law tort law would hold that American was liable for the loss to the would-be passenger, in whatever amount was required to secure a comparable cruise. (Settling for the cost of the missed cruise is an obvious compromise for both plaintiff and defendant when neither would like to gamble on future prices.) Instead the passenger in this instance believed that she was entirely dependent upon American's largesse for compensation, because no one has ever explained her rights.

Unfortunately, under the system of regulations, statutory law, and "tort reform" we have now, it's quite possible that she was owed nothing by any party, and only the threat of publicization actually achieved compensation here. Consider: under the common law, the tortfeasor owes 100% of the loss, in any conceivable circumstance (this being the beauty of common rather than statutory law). Aside from the rare statute granting a double or triple damages, regulations and such can only plausibly reduce the liability, and indeed they do. That is the true primary purpose of much regulatory law in our society; "muh regulations" is only the cover. (The other primary purpose would be to entrench existing market participants.)