121–130 of 242 posts
How does one actually enforce their verbal promise of reimbursement. Is there a government agency where people file their complaints?
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Why would you not get your money back from an airline-initiated cancellation? I get giving up on delay compensation - I'm currently fighting travel insurance on an 18 hour delay that incured a hotel stay - but "we canceled your flight, but we're keeping your money" seems like a scenario where the airline clearly has no leg to stand on. Hell, do a credit card chargeback.
We had flights cancelled — they gave us a "voucher", not our money back. The voucher apparently expires so we had to use it or lose it. Also, the voucher was only good for the ticketed passengers it affected, so we could not use it for one of our daughters, for example. Also, when we did try to use it we were told it was not valid for many of the seats/tickets we were trying to book. Where it was valid: upgraded (bus…
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My time, energy, and inner peace is more valuable than the loss I've incurred ($300) and the mental anguish of waiting for hours to get a customer support person to issue me a refund (someone who has probably been instructed to resist giving me back my money) Vowing to never use their business again (so my loss is limited to a one-time event) and recommending everyone to do the same has worked out pretty well for me…
Chargeback works wonders. They have already determined that they don't care if you fly with them or not, so why not make sure they don't get paid for experience? It is only fair.
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Why would you not get your money back from an airline-initiated cancellation? I get giving up on delay compensation - I'm currently fighting travel insurance on an 18 hour delay that incured a hotel stay - but "we canceled your flight, but we're keeping your money" seems like a scenario where the airline clearly has no leg to stand on. Hell, do a credit card chargeback.
If it was the cheap fare, likely around ~$100 for Spirit, then for a lot of folks it might not be worth fighting with customer service for the money.
Another case where EU has this settled. If an airline cancels a flight, they are obligated to refund the money in the same payment method, or book another flight, depending what the passenger chooses. They have to provide accommodation in a hotel if needed & you can request compensation up to 600 euros if the cancellation/delay was done in short notice.
The EU isn't quite there yet, see the issues with refund processing times during covid for an example. I heard some official talking about how airlines shouldn't be allowed to charge you until you step on the plane, which sounds like a brilliant solution to me. Don't have to fight the airline for compensation for a flight that was cancelled if the airline doesn't have your money yet.
If I may comment on the abstract issue here... the experience of flying (US domestic) is a boiling frog situation. Flying used to be fun. 9-11 greatly accelerated the problems, but it had already been getting worse for decades as its popularity grew. Especially because I have long intervals when I don't fly, I absolutely dread the answer to my question, "What new, horrible treatment / experience / standards / fees /…
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With a general admission concert ticket, your grouping still remains intact. I haven't flown in a while (thankfully), but the original comment makes it sound like they sell you an unassigned seat ticket, but then assign you a specific sometime down the road, perhaps maliciously.
The concert analogy is close but not perfect because the problem is that grouping necessarily puts you into premium seats. If they can sell aisle and window seats at a premium, you can't allow people to group for free without putting people in relatively more premium seats for free. The scale of airline seats (on a single flight) and concert tickets is incredibly different anyway, and different forms of price discrim…
By the time you're calling non-middle seats "premium", we've already lost. We should aim to have markets that provide abundance rather than focusing on extraction through things like price discrimination.
It's indefensible that they sell seats which then aren't actually big enough to fit a person, whether it be their legs or their arms - this is essentially the entire setup of "middle seats".
If they wanted to charge linearly based on dimensions, I'd understand that. But the general pattern with price discrimination is that they charge outsized amounts for slightly more use, because they know they have you over a barrel. See also: dinosaur ISP data caps.
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You only get to fly to see your loved ones if you have enough money too. Ancillary revenue like seat assignment fees makes it so that more people can afford to see their loved ones.
This is only true if those seat assignment charges actually result in significantly lower ticket prices for everyone else, which is far from guaranteed.
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> major TSA delays. This infuriates me. Last week I was stuck in line for TSA for an hour and a half at Sea-Tac. The TSA clowns had one guy looking at the X-rays of luggage at the speed of molasses. Am I to believe that the TSA, FAA and airlines can't coordinate to determine when gluts of incoming passengers are expected? Bullshit. Why didn't they have more TSA workers on shift? Because they don't give a shit, nothin…
It strikes me as remarkable that, in a pandemic which killed several hundred airliners worth of Americans, a lot of fuss was made about mask-related impositions, while TSA-related impositions that save a number of lives that's close to zero have become entirely normal. All War On Terror and no War On Viruses.
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> major TSA delays. This infuriates me. Last week I was stuck in line for TSA for an hour and a half at Sea-Tac. The TSA clowns had one guy looking at the X-rays of luggage at the speed of molasses. Am I to believe that the TSA, FAA and airlines can't coordinate to determine when gluts of incoming passengers are expected? Bullshit. Why didn't they have more TSA workers on shift? Because they don't give a shit, nothin…
Last year I made the mistake of flying up to visit family on Christmas Eve. The TSA line wrapped around the entire airport. Luckily I made it just barely in time. I was already delayed when a nasty accident shit down the interstate and added an extra hour to my airport trip.