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Comment by tarentel | Hacker News Reader

Some will, you just have to pay an extra fee when you buy the ticket. It is ridiculous.

It will typically be in the form of a credit but United, for example, does allow cancellations (not sure how far in advance) for no charge.

I think charging a fee for passenger cancellation insurance is reasonable; the airline takes on a decent amount of risk if a consumer can cancel at any time.

I don’t think anybody’s said so far that it has to be at any time. Up to X number of days out, like most hotels, I think is perfectly reasonable.

That would be reasonable, but I think I could take it or leave it. Planes fill up more than hotels would be my guess, so they'd need a buffer window of like a month? At which point the difference between having and not having cancellation protection seems negligible to me.

I think we’re making a lot of assumptions here. For all we know one to two weeks could make a lot of sense.

I understand airlines are very feast or famine and often operate on very thin margins, but at this point I’m willing to pay a little more for the experience to not be so categorically and consistently miserable

I think for me my main gripe with air travel is how hard it is to predict the price and how high the prices are. It takes me like a day of research to book a flight due to how careful I have to be to confirm what luggage I'm allowed/etc. And it's incredibly easy for me to get burned because aggregator sites like Google flights can't tell you eg how much a carry-on would cost, so I have to try to determine if the cheaper flight is _actually_ cheaper, etc etc. And I'm tired of having family have to pay crazy hundred dollar + fees for an extra carry on because the eco light ticket (although the ticket just says eco on it) doesn't actually include a personal item, that's only part of the eco ticket, and since you're at the counter that's going to be $100 fee for you to carry a purse onto the plane. -_- Shout out Condor.

Otherwise I find everything ok. The flights are fine -- packed but it is what it is there's high demand. I could do with/without the food if it reduced the price, I can pack my own. But otherwise I find them fine.

What makes air travel miserable for you?

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