Of course nobody is expecting that they "keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings". But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service. The fact that an airline will sometimes fail to get their customers to their destination and will have to compensate them for it, is just the cost of doing business.
Luckily in the UK and the EU your right to compensation for delayed flights is enshrined in law.
FWIW I think we should have the same laws in the US that you all have in the UK and EU.
I was referring to the case when an engine went bad and company had to use intermediate airport and accomodate all users for the night. Also you wouldn't want to punish company hard for admiting technical issues, since that might cause them to underreport and create dangerous situations.
No. We insure ourselves against unforeseen events whose effects are financially unbearable to us otherwise. You've conveniently carved out certain unforeseen events in order to serve your point rather than being intellectually honest.
Businesses insure themselves against the death of an important employee, for example. If that employee is murdered, that is neither an act of nature, an accident, nor thievery.
You might argue "you were robbed of an employee" and stretch the meaning of the word "thief" but then I'd say a similar stretching of "act of nature [or] accident" includes "aircraft malfunction"
Businesses also insure against a great many other things.
The airline itself should insure against such events, or rather what follows from them.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-airlines-are-always-going-bankru...
I've had plenty of bad airline experiences and wished they gave me more for my trouble, but clearly they are unable to at current margins. If you want the market to provide a better service, it already does: you can pay tons more to fly private, either a charter or your own jet you purchased!
It's weird to see people simp for the airline industry. A cursory google search shows that United Airlines, to take one example, made $4,300,000,000 in profits before taxes last year. This is money that could easily be spent on things like better maintenance, more pilots and crew, and other expenditures that would make flights less apt to be delayed or canceled. Instead it goes to shareholders and executives.
https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...
I wouldn't be surprised that an airline lost money in one of the worst travel years of all time (due to Covid).
Cursory searching shows United made more than $3,000,000,000 in 2024. So even if 2025 was an unusually good year for them, it wasn't a complete anomaly. Just goes to show that when flights get delayed due to insufficient available crew or maintenance issues, it's a savings that's passed on to investors and the c-suite at the expense of consumers.
Maybe you're not understanding what we're saying. There have been numerous comments remarking on flights that were delayed or canceled due to corporate decisions, which reduce to excess savings on (or insufficient investment in) maintenance and staffing. This has nothing to do with "better perks"!
Every dollar of profit is a dollar that could have been spent on maintenance and staffing, or god forbid, proactive investment in better systems and infrastructure. No one is saying that airlines should become non-profits. But I have a feeling three or four or five BILLION dollars in profits is too much.
My understanding is that a portion of net profits might go towards rewarding shareholders through buybacks (bolstering the stock price), but most of it is reinvested into the business, i.e. exactly what you are saying you wish they would do. A windfall enables them to purchase more aircraft and pay down debt accumulated in the years they do not make much in profit, of which there were many in recent history. Is it too much profit? I don't know, but they're spending over $7 billion in capital expenditures this year.
I'm not sure what to say to you wanting them to have better tech. I wrote code for a major shipping company over 2 decades ago, and it's impressive to me that airlines mishandle bags at a far lower rate (under half a percent) than UPS and Fedex which usually are around 3-5%. I'm not a logistics expert. Will things get better with robots or something? Time will tell.
Would you prefer I spend some time telling my personal horror stories? Or should I point out that while a meaningful minority of those profits have recently been going to buybacks (a billion or less) which do benefit shareholders and executives to some degree (although a lot of executive compensation is already paid before we're looking at net profits), most of those are going to the needs of the airline which operates in a very capital-intensive industry. They have do do things like, y'know, BUY AIRPLANES. A bit pricier than those MacBooks a typical SaaS is purchasing. Apparently, after the industry was deregulated, it made it very difficult to keep some routes stable, and the article calls into question whether you can actually have a free market ever reach equilibrium or if the strange nature of this particular industry will always be pushing one of the players towards bankruptcy.
Of course, you only performed a cursory look. Perhaps if you had put in a little effort, you'd realize you didn't just singlehandedly fix the airline industry!
That link I shared was not some random, cursory look at the biz. I felt I learned a lot from it. I'm not able to verify whether the conclusions are accurate, but if they are, it sounds like the business has some pretty unusual problems, and where to go from here is not at all clear.
Your entire point is completely at odds to reality. In the general case, contracts do not guarantee there are never problems, and problems happening do not create an automatic entitlement to sue. The entire point of contracts is to protect both parties.
Ultimately, if you are travelling, you are relying on *you* to get yourself there. Airlines and hotels will help, there's compensation available to some degree, but extrapolating that out to "everything is someone else's responsibility and I deserve to be compensated for everything I hoped to achieve" is pure fantasy.
If you book a hotel room for 1-7 August to visit a conference, would you be okay if they said "oopsie, it'll be available for you 10-17 August, here's a $100 compensation"? What about a rental car, or food delivery? Is it okay for your wedding photographer to show up a day late? Of course not, the product you bought is inherently time-sensitive.
If you take a taxi to a meeting and the taxi broke down so you missed some important meeting, should the taxi driver / company compensate you for that too? Or do they just refund you the fare, or pay for a different taxi?
Do you think this is how companies sell things? With uncapped liability?
Do you think AWS reimburses customers for their lost revenue when they have an outage?
Yes, you have agreed to SLAs. Credit is issued on your bill if they slip away from the 99% uptime contract.
You can absolutely find someone willing to sell you insurance on whatever you need for a price, but the airline isn't in the business of insuring the value of your meetings.
I don't think that's reasonable. If you have a lot to lose then extra insurance should be a premium offering.
By this logic, should I be able to sue Brooks Brothers for lost earnings if I split my pants in the middle of a sales pitch? Goodyear if I blow a tire on the way to a job interview? Taco Bell if I crap my pants in the middle of Jeopardy?
This generally only applies to direct losses, though. If Amazon ships you a defective Bic pen, and it leaves you unable to sign a time-critical $1B contract, Amazon is only liable for the cost of the Bic pen - not the resulting $1B loss.
You might be able to sue for the cost of obtaining a replacement pen, but anything beyond that isn't going to happen without some kind of bespoke SLA.
You can sue anyone for anything. But when a service provider can't provide service because of acts of god, accidents, safety issues, or equipment failure, that's just... reality. Courts are not going to give you a huge payout because Delta refused to fly you in a broken plane to make your meeting. This is why insurance is a thing.
I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
For starters, they could have offered more than $100 to OP here
Critically they promise "by a certain time" as well. Surely with so many miles you are aware of the "significant disruption to my travel plans" aspect to getting compensated for a service that they failed to deliver.
Plane crews timing out on the tarmac at midnight forcing everyone aboard to lose a day of travel is not a "sob story" it is a systemic and purposeful optimization on the airline's part, a gamble that they can put up enough customer service phone menus and hoops that they only have to comp a small portion of customers whose time and money they've misappropriated.
ETA: my example above is to point out that even in the common failure cases airlines are awful, and as OP shares, even worse in the rare engine failure case. Yeah, they don't directly control that the engine failed (unless we start talking about how lack of maintenance and overworked mechanics contribute to that, which we should, and is under their control btw) but a hundred bucks for being stranded in the jungle is an insult no matter how you slice it
It would kinda surprise me if that’s true. There’s an enormous difference in cost to provide a best effort, usually fine service, and a contract to get you there by a deadline. I could be mistaken but I bet there is no such promise.
Travel insurance is can be purchased for situations where a delay or canceled flight would create unusual costs for the traveler.
Better call your AI company for a refund. That my friend was an hallucination and you've been promised no such thing.
That's a strawman of the request, not the request. The request is that, same as anything else in a proper Free Market, the price includes all costs and internalizes all direct risks. I'm paying $XYZ to be delivered from point A to point B on a given date with a ~roughly given time. I don't expect there to never ever be trouble, that's life. I do expect them to take care of all trouble however, as I am in their care. If they create a need for a hotel stay, then they should pay for that. If they lose luggage, they should pay for that. If they have to reroute, put me on another mode of transportation, or whatever, that should all be their problem. And if they can't deliver reasonably appropriate service they should partially or fully refund the purchase.
This is critical to a functioning market. If Airlines Alpha & Beta both have a incident rate of 0.5% but Airline Omega has an incident rate of 4%, what should happen is Omega has to compete or go out of business vs the other two (and then someone new comes in and gets the assets to try a different approach). Maybe they save enough money over that they can offer lower prices anyway, or have high enough quality or unique offerings elsewhere to charge a higher price, or accept even lower margins, or some combo. But what cannot be allowed is for them to externalize that onto the public, because then the prices are fraudulent and no longer comparable between competitors. The market can't respond if the pricing signal gets muted. Unsurprisingly lots of players would love to be able to advertise a lower price not through actually earning a lower price but just socializing costs, but that's not ok.
>But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.
Horse baloney, margins have nothing to do with this. Every airlines can and should be held to the same standard, so it's just a universal cost same as jet fuel. They're all in the same boat so long as they perform the same. If some airlines have much higher failure rates then others, then yeah they're going to have to address that somehow and that's exactly how it should be! Normal adult businesses deal with this via prevention, insurance and buffers, it's simply a cost of doing honest business.
However, your airline ticket alone is not that. It’s just a contract to carry you from point A to point B, and that will happen at a scheduled time if everything goes well.
Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
Furthermore, there are basically no product categories that include all possible costs and internalizes all risks. Every single thing you buy has some kind of risk involved.
If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time. They don’t know or care if I traveled across town or across the world to see that event. It’s not their financial responsibility if I blew $2,000 flying to NYC from some far away country to see their event.
When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages. Even if they do compensate me for outages, they don’t compensate me based on the specific amount of disruption it caused in my life. I don’t get to tell the utility company “I work from home as a lawyer and this outage cost me $500/hour” and magically get that amount compensated to me.
If my local baseball game gets rained out and the game is made up another game, it’s not the team’s responsibility if I’m no longer in town or can’t make the new time. They even sell insurance for this very possibility when you buy group suite tickets. If you don’t buy the insurance you are SOL during a rain-out.
You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time. When you buy a car there’s no guarantee that there will be a set cost of maintenance or that unexpected problems will not occur, there’s only a highly limited warranty to cover manufacturing defects. Warranty length and coverage varies widely by manufacturer.
Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Software has no warranty. At all. Period. Not even enterprise software. At best you get a service agreement where you get some kind of pittance of a reimbursement when something goes wrong.
And that's wrong. Same as warranties on products being far, far below reasonably expected working lifetime but with the option to have an added warranty. That sort of behavior is very common in our society at this point, but it's all bad.
>You just have to pay for the real cost of that service.
Ie, you just have to except the airlines externalizing that onto society right now. Doesn't mean we can't advocate for a free market instead though.
>Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
You are demonstrating incredibly muddled thinking here, as well as leaping into your own brand new strawmen. Saying how things "should" be by definition is not saying how they are. I argued specifically against a strawman and incorrect point, and I said that it was a "request", I never claimed the contracts were secret or didn't have all sorts of BS escape clauses that, in many jurisdictions (though not so much in the EU), are unfortunately legal.
>If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time.
The broadway show doesn't involve taking physical control over your physical body in time and space. You cannot just step out and leave partway through a flight. That you'd use this as an example is either stupid or malicious.
>When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages
Your utility is massively regulated and depending on jurisdiction yes, they will indeed pay for certain levels of issues, as PG&E has been discovering in California over the last few decades. You don't pay for power not delivered, you are allowed to generate your own power and store it. There are SLAs available for utility services as well.
>You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time
>Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Which, again, is bad, not good as you are arguing. That bad stuff exists elsewhere does not in fact mean we can't want to improve where possible incrementally.
Yes, we live in society the whole time, and no doubt you are very smart.
I would be in agreement with you that more customer protections are usually a good thing and that most jurisdictions on this planet really don’t have enough of them. Certainly I would agree that airlines shouldn’t be allowed to engage in as many anti-consumer games as they play in the status quo.
That said, I think we can both understand that there has to be a limit at some point to the risk internalization that a business can be reasonably expected to bear just to exist and sell products. Otherwise, it pushes costs higher for everyone and makes competition more difficult to come by.
It also limits product choice because many consumers prefer to choose higher risk options specifically to save on cost.
If airlines have to charge 10% more now because they have to compensate everyone’s hotel, car rental, and wasted DisneyWorld tickets for every canceled/delayed flight (I’m not saying you are advocating for such a thing, just a hypothetical), and I’m a customer who has a flexible schedule and never utilizes those compensations, now I’m just paying 10% more to get no additional protection for me personally.
This concept is essentially imposing a risk tax on all of society to normalize risks, and it might be argued that such a tax is not very progressive or productive.
Regardless of where we decided to specifically draw the line, any increase in compensatory duties imposed on airlines will increase pricing for their services. The airline industry is the perfect case study for that idea because it’s essentially a zero-margin business. Almost every US airline loses money flying and makes up for those losses with credit card programs. So if they have to start compensating for more scenarios, our ticket prices are going up, guaranteed. It’s not like Apple where imposing mandatory replaceable batteries or a 2 year warranty would barely change the economics of their business and greatly benefit consumers.
My main idea was not to bring up a bunch of irrelevant strawman examples, they were more to point out the fact that acceptable harm or risk is something of a universal concept in commerce. It’s not reasonable to ask beer companies to pay for every health complication of alcoholics just like it’s not reasonable to ask airlines to pay for every consequence of a delayed flight. This is because the level of risk was already agreed to by society: everyone knows that beer is bad for your health[1] just like everyone knows flights sometimes get delayed or canceled.
[1] The only reason the tobacco industry got into legal trouble is because they lied about their knowledge of its unhealthiness and addictive qualities.
Contrast this to airlines. They have ZERO incentives to delay your flight. They have zero incentive to divert passengers to another airport. They have no incentive to cancel, or otherwise prevent their plane from getting to its destination. Their interests are fully aligned with yours in this regard.
But then corporates go brainwashing on tv that too much regulations are killing business.
You can have rights or ease of business, nailing both, sounds difficult.
I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.
It's actually pretty simple to understand how I offer them grace, it's because they're terrible businesses with terrible financials. Airlines run on brutally thin margins, barely 5% in the best of years and usually closer to 1-3% in average years, and frequently wipe themselves out, as Spirit did here. They generally make less than 10 USD in profit per customer.
Because I don't want to pay an extra 100 USD for a marginally nicer experience, and w neither does anyone else. I want the cheapest possible way to be thrown through the air across an ocean. I'm not going to fault them for acting like assholes when I pay them like an asshole.
I think that in the EU, compensation for such an event is at least 600€, plus all expenses paid (including meals, hotel, etc...). The airline most likely offered $100 as an attempt to settle for way less than what they legally owe.
Without further information, we can't really blame the company for the incident itself, and they may have had no other option regarding what happened in Manaus, but they definitely had the option of offering proper compensation instead of threats.
Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.
Going to court is the standard, and usually the only, path for resolving disagreements that parties cannot easily resolve between themselves. Retaliating by putting the passenger on a no fly list deserves public shaming and pushback.
For example, a major grocery store can put people on a "do not come here again" list. But this is an easy way for a big business to hurt a person and should not be used for minor issues. I might see this "the business bans whoever it wants for any reason" as a legitimate defense, but not in a regulated business with high barrier to entry.
This is the kind of attitude that puts pressure on airlines and thus pilots to fly even when situation is dubious.
They can carry insurance or spend the correct amount on maintenance so this doesn't happen.
And just for your information, since you seem to be oblivious, perfectly maintained equipment can still have issues.
And whether the company owes you anything depends on the jurisdictions involved, in US you ain't entitled to much.
Everything done to and in an airplane is recorded, there are standard procedures for emergency situations, which pilots are expected to follow, and if the pilot didn't, he needs a really good reason, and avoiding passengers suing the company for compensation is not a good reason. We may be taking criminal charges here, this is one of the few cases where high ranking officials can go to prison, in addition to fines big enough to bankrupt the company. This is serious business, and the reason why aviation is so safe despite the risks inherent to flying.
Safety, and in particular compliance with safety regulations is non-negotiable. And you will notice that even the shittiest airlines (including Spirit) have a safety record on par with the best. It is just too risky to try to save money here.
Don't skimp on maintenance, make sure you have planes that can do divert in time.
If there was engine troubles in the middle of the ocean would it still be okay?
Insane bruv
Regarding "carry insurance": margins in the airline business are notoriously slim. They compete very heavily on cost, because the service they provide is a commodity (or close to it). Most airlines will probably not willingly add any extra costs that they don't have to, because that would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors.
For those passengers who are willing to pay extra to be reimbursed for delays or other inconveniences, there may be travel insurance that can provide that.
This is true, but not relevant here?
If you pay for a service, and you don't get that service, are you implying that you should just be SOL?
If the plane has an issue, and the pilot rightfully lands it for safety concerns, but the paying passengers don't get where they are going, that sounds like the airline's problem to me, not the passengers' problem.
At the very minimum the passenger should be refunded for their ticket, because they didn't get what they paid for.
There are already too many negative consequences in the world of commercial transactions that the end-consumer gets saddled with simply because they don't have the leverage, money or time to fight for redress.
Not parents fault the airline flies around with defective hardware.
Usually this is regulated by law.