Refund.me: making you cash from your flight delays | Hacker News Reader

Refund.me: making you cash from your flight delays

venturevillage.eu

28 pointsitsybaev20 comments

Here I was thinking it was a travel booking website that tried to find the least-optimal flight schedule on planes that were always overbooked, increasing your chances for a bump & compensation.

So if anyone wants to work on that idea, I'm all for it.

Running a professional bump&compensation fund sounds like a fun project. Would love to see how this works out. At the same time it would be a consumer-protection service as it would de-incentivize airlines from overbooking flights.

Actually, all the stuff that I read about overbooking flights seems strange, as I (and my colleagues) have flown a lot and have never even seen such an incident of overbooking.

It may be that excessive overbooking is an USA-specific issue, and here in EU airlines are already deincentivized from this due to the compensations they would have to pay.

I've had it happen to me 4 times (BA, BM) on the Friday flights back to Glasgow. Compensated every time, in all but one case cash in hand. I was also offered an overnight stay in Prague when they overbooked my flight back to Schipol, but unfortunately I'd switched flights to Zurich moments before they told me.

I did have one odd delay with EasyJet - not due to overcrowding - where our plane from Luton to Glasgow was reassigned to a flight to Malta - probably because they were about to hit the limit for compensation - and Stelios, then the owner of the airline, took the flight up with us to apologise in person to every passenger.

it's more that it happens a lot in very concentrated periods. There's are things like 3 day blocks in the summer where it happens a lot, and outside of that it disappears.

FYI, the compensation paid by the airlines is decent (new ticket(bumped to business) + 800 dollars for an int'l flight). These are FAA rules, not EU. I am not sure of the EU compensation scheme but I think it's around the same idea.

I experienced it once, while flying back to Brazil from London using British Airways. They fucked up so badly, they were asking for volunteers the first day (I volunteered, got paid £450 + hotel, a sweet deal if you ask me), and then again next day. I've seen it happen again on a trip from Buenos Aires to SF.

I think this phenomenon is probably more noticeable in infrequent (daily or so) 'important' (read: long and expensive) flights people are unlikely to forget about or cancel at the last minute.

I see it a lot in the summer, especially on flights that are heavy with tourists. The airlines are selling last-minute tickets to business travelers at the higher last-minute prices. It seems like they actually can make money doing this.

If the business traveller paid $1200 over what the tourist paid, giving the tourist $700-$800 back still makes the airline a higher amount of revenue.

That's hilarious but there's something really unethical about that though!

Perhaps. But one can argue that overselling flights is unethical as well. And yet it goes on every day.

I used flightright ( http://www.flightright.eu/ ) once when the leap second took down the whole air france booking system. Was a pretty easy process and I got some money back. I like the general idea.

Looking at refund.me, I see a service I might want to use but I also see a lot of things that distract me from using the service.

Here's an annotated version of the frontpage:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s28/sh/d6d22247-63f2-4ec7-967...

(this might sound harsh, but I really like what you guys are doing :) )

Hey rb2k_, cool comment! Care to "alpha test" my MVP in about a week's time?

I don't currently have a grudge with any airline :)

This entire business is predicated on a government sanctioned extortion of the airlines. The moment this thing gets popular, the airlines would lobby the government heavily to remove the regulations and tank the business.

A good idea while it lasts though. :)

As if they weren't lobbying already for many years. No, here in EU legislators actually do pay more attention to consumer rights than companies - at least in the mass-markets that they understand, unlike software.

This legislation has been here for a long time and will stay, although the manual process is a bit of a hassle, it's still worth the money. And it's not extortion, it's how a normal deal should work - we had an agreement and I paid you to do X; you didn't fulfill your part and caused me damages (wasted time, missed connection flights, etc) - so pay up. In USA the same principle (damages from breach of contract) should apply, simply there it's too expensive to enforce your rights, so airlines get away with shafting you.

I don't understand why there's this myth that there are no rules in the US.

http://www.consumertraveler.com/today/dots-new-rules-%E2%80%...

Seems to me that this app doesn't use any advanced android features, so requiring android 4.0 is needlessly excluding a lot of potential customers.

Edit: Almost 60% of android users, in fact. [1]

[1]: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

In my experience, this usually occurs because you naively use a seemingly simple API function that only supports 4.0, but would take significant time to backport. (I've done this accidently with the DownloadManager API when I needed to support pre-Gingerbread apps).

I can't remember the name of it, but there is a company that does something similar for shipping delays with UPS and FedEx. A company that ships a lot of packages can get thousands in rebates since a percentage of those deliveries will probably be late. Are there any other industries where rebates often go unclaimed?

I think the service you're thinking of is called PackageFox.

Yes, that's it!

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