Why Do Airlines Get Away With This?

…and how can we change it?

It’s been a long pandemic for all of us. To date, we’ve chosen to restrict our travel to driving in our neck of the Northeast. Now we’re finally ready for a big trip to California. It will be our six-year-old’s first experience flying. Given that an hour and a half in the car is a barely endurable trial of patience (“Are we there yet?…”), the experience will undoubtedly be… an opportunity for growth for all of us.

I mention this because one of the major constraints in slogging through available flight bookings was to find the shortest layovers for our one-stop flights there and back. The travels days will be long and the last thing we want is to spend extra hours biding our time in the confines of an airport with our young child.

After many hours of research and conversation about departure times, flight durations, and layover times, we found a roundtrip flight on American Airlines. It was manageable and didn’t require arriving at the airport at the crack of dawn or for the 10:00 PM redeye. We went ahead and booked it, four months in advance, through a third party site. We thought we were all set.

If you or I bought a pair of black shoes in size 10, and the seller sent grey shoes in size 9, we would send them back and expect a refund. If the seller refused and said that they were out of the black in size 10, that the colors were close enough, and that they only offered refunds for shoes that were at least two sizes off, we’d think they were certifiably insane. Their refusal would clearly be actionable and we could count on the vendor, the credit card company, and the law to back us up.

Four days after booking the flights, I get a text at 4:35 AM stating that our itinerary had been changed. On the trip out, we’d be leaving two hours later (not great, but okay), but departing, we’d have to leave 2 and a half hours earlier, arriving at the airport at 7:15 AM, and endure a roughly 3-hour layover in Philadelphia. Not what I paid close to two grand for, not to mention the apparently pointless hours of research and effort I put in to finding appropriate flights.

Of course, the airline said very nicely that because I didn’t purchase the tickets through them, they couldn’t do anything about the situation and that I’d need to take up the issue with the online vendor who purchased the tickets on my behalf.

I spoke with the vendor to see if I could book on a different airline that had the scheduled flights we originally purchased on American. They said that since it was more than 24 hours after I booked, they couldn’t refund the tickets because it was the airline’s policy that flight changes that are less than four hours different are non-refundable.

WHAT???

I understand that there are equipment, weather, personnel, and scheduling issues that could cancel a flight. More darkly, there are also algorithmic “efficiencies” that might warrant consolidating flights to better serve the company’s bottom line.

But none of that should be my problem. The flight I chose and paid for was cancelled. They’re the ones running their business and if they can’t deliver what they offered and I purchased in good faith, it should fall to them to absorb any associated cost. They can offer to change my flight and I can accept the offer, or not. Insisting that I have no say in the matter and no right to a refund is a hardcore bait-and-switch.

It is entirely unreasonable that the airlines are apparently entitled to dictate how important a four-hour span of time is to a “valued” customer. Currently, if their change interferes with your needs or constraints it’s your problem. For instance, if it precludes arrangements for a ride to or from the airport, that can be an added expense of several hundred dollars in parking or limo service fees—expenses for which they clearly have no liability.

I’m pretty sure it’s accepted fact nowadays that airline consolidation has resulted in fewer airlines with greater market share — in other words, decreased competition, higher prices, and decreased quality of service.

When booking our flights, I accepted that I would have to pay for baggage, and might have to pay for the family to sit together, or for my kid to have window seat, or that legroom might be more cramped than I remember it.

However, the basic issue of getting what you paid for is at the heart of consumer protection. The airlines have cheap, last minute fares for people with flexible schedules — there’s value for both parties and everyone knows what they’re getting.

I, on the other hand, paid full price for a specific set of flights that fit my needs. If those flights are cancelled, I might have a problem with the substitute flights, or if I had to rebook, I would be inconvenienced by wasted time and the increased cost of booking less far in advance. In either case, it should be my choice as to which inconvenience I’d prefer.

So, what can be done about this appropriation of power by our corporate overlords? I suppose media exposure could help. In Connecticut, we have responsive elected representatives, but the idea that they could effect tighter regulations against this type of thievery in the current climate of corporate permissiveness seems like a long-shot. Clearly, we should have EU-like regulations that uniformly govern our rights when dealing with the vagaries of the airlines.

And yes, I use the word “thievery” intentionally. My time is valuable. So is yours. By forcing us to accept cancellations or arbitrary schedule changes, the airlines are transferring the cost of their business constraints to us.

Perhaps Cory Doctorow or Douglas Rushkoff might have some ideas on effective ways to assert our common sense rights with regard to what is, for many, a necessity of modern life.

If you have any ideas, please drop a comment!

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, please don’t forget to hit the “Applause” icon as many times as you’d like. You can also subscribe to get my latest content straight to your inbox.

If you’re not already, you might want to consider becoming a Medium member to get unlimited access to all of the wonderful writers and articles on Medium. If you register using this link, you can help support my work as a writer, researcher, and creator.