How Airline Lobbyists Just Got Humiliated | Hacker News Reader

How Airline Lobbyists Just Got Humiliated

thebignewsletter.com

32 pointstoomuchtodo27 comments

  The lead Senators, Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz, probably didn’t realize what had happened, as they did seek to do something useful for consumers, and the FAA reauthorization bill is sprawling and it’s easy to lose track of the details of every provision.

Sure, a completely honest mistake. No way our caring politicians would have let that language be inserted into the law.

I would love if these documents were version controlled so we could see exactly whose office inserted the language. Which makes so much sense, I doubt it will ever happen.

> I would love if these documents were version controlled

2013 was a fun year in DC, on this topic Tom MacWright was scraping the DC Code from some vendor, Joshua Tauberer pitched in to help remove the WestLaw redistributor's IP that they were attaching everywhere... Tom started posting copies of the DC Code to github, updating as it changed. One of Tom's key posts: https://macwright.com/2013/04/04/the-open-code.html Local coverage: https://ggwash.org/view/30874/a-copy-of-dcs-laws-is-now-free... .

Eventually this kind of shook out into the Open Law Library https://openlawlib.org/ . Which is used to maintain & update the DC Code on Github, https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-html .

I wish I had a little better idea of how things evolved in the intervening decade. I don't know much about Open Law Library, to be honest, or who else these efforts are helping now. But these incipient years were great years here in town. The meetup scene was excellent in general, and Tom showing up & going through blockbuster hits like these efforts was just a mind-blowingly break-out-the-champagne joy-inspiration supreme.

It needs to go much further. The practice of overbooking flights must be ended, and compensation enacted retroactively. It’s not just about airlines - it’s about fair practices across the entire economy. There need to be visible consequences for fraud.

Overbooking allows for reduced emissions, as more flights are closer to capacity. Do you think that eliminating the practice will be beneficial on net?

Overbooking would be fine if all of their sales literature makes it clear that you're effectively buying a lottery ticket to get on the plane. If it's being sold as a confirmed ticket, it needs to be actually there. They already have a mechanism to do that too; you can get on waitlists.

Turns out they can't sell things at the same price when it's a waitlist, though.

Of all the reasons my travel might get interrupted, overbooking is among the least likely. It sucks when it happens, but so does anything (flight delay/cancellation, missed connection, etc.) that means I don't get where I wanted to on time. The compensation paid out to people bumped due to oversold flights is high enough that it's really almost a non-issue in practice.

Yeah as long as the compensation for involuntary deboarding due to overbooking is high enough I don’t see a problem with the practice. It would be a huge waste to force airlines to fly around with empty seats to reduce the already tiny risk of someone getting kicked off the plane due to overbooking and lack of volunteers.

Why does the airline get to use violence to pay under market value to get someone off their plane?

Keep bidding up the compensation till someone volunteers. Don't like the cost? To bad.

That’s just not how contract law works, at least in the west. You will generally never be forced to fulfil your obligations under a contract, rather you have to (reasonably) compensate the other party if you cannot.

For more on this topic, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_performance

Why stop at that? It would reduce emissions even further if airlines were allowed to take customers' money and not provide any flights whatsoever.

Then they wouldn't get the chance to upsell you on overpriced liquor. That's where the real money is.

That's funny because airlines are now also straight up asking customers during checkout for donations to go toward some mysterious emission reduction expenses meanwhile C-suites aren't taking pay cuts. Why is this the customer's responsibility? Privatize profits socialize losses etc

>The practice of overbooking flights must be ended

Overbooking flights isn't bad per se. There's good reason to do it, namely that people are inevitably flakey, so the airlines being able to oversell some seats allows them to get more revenue on a flight, and therefore allow them to charge everyone slightly less. As long as this is clearly disclosed, passengers are given an explicit choice and/or compensation if they're bumped, I don't see why it should be banned.

>and compensation enacted retroactively

Probably not constitutional, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

It isn't allowed in any other industry I know of though.

At an extreme, imagine getting a contract to work at company X, so you quit your current job and move to the other side of the country, just to be told they overprovisionned the position expecting some candidates to flake out and void your contract with a ticket to get extra bonus next time you get to work for them.

Or getting a loan to buy a house, just to be told at the last minute that someone else beat you to the line.

In most other situations we'd have the airlines eat the risk,and they'd need to find other ways to make it work (have a pool of non priority cargo to fill the plane for instance)

Many or almost all subscription services are oversubscribed. Cable Internet, Internet in general, gym memberships, etc.

The question is what happens when it hits maximum.

>At an extreme, imagine getting a contract to work at company X, so you quit your current job and move to the other side of the country, just to be told they overprovisionned the position expecting some candidates to flake out and void your contract with a ticket to get extra bonus next time you get to work for them.

You don't need to overprovision employees because if one person flakes out, you can move onto the next best candidate. There's very little cost to doing this, and therefore companies don't do it because of the negative blowback they might get if the scenario you described happen. Moreover, have you forgotten the tech layoffs of 2022/2023? They were underprovisioned one day, and the next they were overprovisioned, and hundreds/thousands got laid off. People even had their offers rescinded after they put in notice at their previous company, or after they've already located.

>Or getting a loan to buy a house, just to be told at the last minute that someone else beat you to the line.

The house isn't yours until you sign on the dotted line. Before then the house is heavily oversubscribed. There might be dozens of buyers with offers for the same house.

Making explicit whether a ticket is a guaranteed placement or is a waitlist would make the practice clearer.

I don't know what the no-show fraction is, so pulling numbers out of /dev/ass: airlines might be mandated to sell 85% of tickets as assured placement (with corresponding cancellation penalities), and 25% of seats as provisional or standbye. Most of the standbye tickets would actually be seated, some would not. (In my hypothetical, the flight is 10% overbooked.) In the event of a standbye ticketholder being bumped, they'd be promoted to guaranteed placement on the next available flight (and perhaps given a service upgrade as well.)

People with flexible travel schedules (students, some vacationers) could opt for a lower-cost provisional ticket. Those with fixed iteneraries or group-travel requirements (business travellers, families, etc.) would buy a guaranteed seat. Airlines could of course vary pricing by ticket class accordingly.

In this case, the status and pricing would be explicit.

And the overbooking / provisional fraction would likely vary by conditions --- high-travel periods, days of the week, and/or time-of-day might have a larger share of provisional seats. Low-travel periods, where flights are not fully booked would offer a larger share of, or exclusively, guaranteed tickets.

Much of what I describe already exists, but effectively all coach-class ticketholders are provisional. Bumping occurs rarely, but can be highly disruptive when it does occur. With an explicit class of provisional tickets, expectations and needs could be better met.

I wonder what was preventing you from doing a chargeback if your flight was cancelled with no reasonable alternative? Then it's between the airline and their bank.

I did exactly that with Aeroflot - I had tickets to Thailand during Covid back in 2020, and obviously the flight was cancelled and Aeroflot was talking about vouchers and how it would keep holding passengers' money to survive through tough times - I've just filed a charge dispute with Russian branch of Raiffeisen and got money back in a month.

And since the USA is the proverbial land of the credit card and chargeback, what stops you?

Credit cards will often tell you that you can’t chargeback an airline. DOT complaint is the only option.

Is that a part of a policy that's written down anywhere?

> Since you can’t sue an airline, there’s little anyone can do except complaint to the Department of Transportation.

I think this is the really big WTF here: Why the hell can't you sue an airline? How did that become law, and why wasn't it overturned as clearly unconstitutional?

Has a case on its constitutionality been brought to the Federal Courts, and the Supreme Court? If not, there's your reason, and that's a reliably common problem.

Title left uneditorialized, could probably be changed by a mod. Shared due to context around the legislative and political mechanics that led to the outcome. Good read imho.

I’m annoyed by premature celebratory back-patting when it comes to what Congress hasn’t yet done, of which this is a case in point:

> Yesterday, the full FAA authorization bill passed the Senate, and will likely pass the House next week, after which it will be signed into law.

Here’s hoping it actually passes and becomes law.

They should get out of that business altogether and let anyone sue an airline

> [deregulation] also prohibited consumers from suing airlines, meaning that airlines are the only corporations that consumers cannot take to court.

Really? I thought drug companies also had indemnity for vaccines https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation

> President Bush approved the merger of U.S. Airways and America West

Which president Bush? And was it literally a choice made by the president? Or a ruling by some agency of the executive branch? And one of the carriers being in bankruptcy at the time of merger suggests the story might not be so simple as it is being portrayed.

This sloppy writing and the click bait title make this article hard to take seriously.

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