Even the attendants were baffled

@Ari, I’m not always comfortable with claims for compensation that exceed the actual extra expense(s) incurred by a passenger when an airline (or bus/rail/ship/taxi service, hotel, restaurant, etc.) screw up.

In your own incident, I gather you had to miss the wedding, though you didn’t explicitly say so. If you did miss it, how much would be reasonable for . . . well, let’s call it the ever-popular “pain and suffering”?

Before I go on, I do not now and have not ever worked for any airline or any other ttravel=related business. I have now and have had in the past friends who are and were. I also have never owned any stock in any airline, etc.

While I don’t mean to imply that an airline that blows it should be allowed to just walk away leaving the passenger holding the bag (and not just figuratively holding it), I’ve long wondered when enough is enough. two experiences of mine reinforce my feeling.

In mid-1986, I took a United flight to LA via Denver to connect with an onward flight to China via the now-defunct CAAC, China’s flag carrier, on one of CAAC’s then-three-times-per-week flights between China and the U.S. I *had* to make the connection, if at all possible.

In Denver, an agent came around offering $59 vouchers to anyone who would volunteer for a flight delay, one long enough I would have missed my LA-Beijing flight. Given the demands of my schedule, I was never a candidagte for the offer, which escalated to $300 cash-on-the-spot (the agent approached me two or three times, desperate, due to a major overbooking problem on the Denver-LA flight).

But quite a few people did accept. the put-off for me was that some, especially early on, told others to wait — to get more money. That’s hardly the spirit of volunteering. The fact that they were volunteering to accommodate the needs of a large airline, not some starving street person, shouldn’t matter, IMHO. either volunteer without expectation of reward (and if you get it, great) — or stay mum, if your main interest is to make yourself a opbject at an auction, in a sense, if an auction with only a single bidder (the airline rep).

Another incident in mid-1990, also involving overbooking, confirmed my thoughts in Denver earlier. My wife dallied in the duty-free area in SF while I went to the gate to check us in for our flight to Beijing. The desk clerk was on the phone when I walked up, and I overheard him say he was desperate to get r more volunteers to take the JAL flight to Tokyo — through which my wife and I were scheduled to pass — set to leave in 5 minutes or so. Our flight (coincidentally, on United) had us laying over in SF about 2 hours and about the same at Narita. If we left then, it would mean a longer Narita layover, but a shorter SF one. So, when the guy hung up, I volunteered us, expecting nothing — there was no talk of compensation, vouchers, nothing like that. I rushed to get my wife then when we treturned, the guy handed me an envelope and said something like, “The check’s inside.” I was genuinely puzzled. When he told me it was $400 each compensation for our being “bumped,” I tried to return it — our tickets cost slightly less apiece than the $800, gor pete’s sake, and in any case, we hadn’t been BUMPED — I had volunteered.

He and his supervisor, who was standing there, were quite insistent, so I finally took the money, though I later wrote United, both to thank them and to say I didn’t think they should have to pay me in such a case. (The guys in SF had said federal law required it.)

Why should they have paid? The JAL flight had much better cabin service and food anyway (sorry, United!), we reconnected with the onward flight Narita-Beijing on United without a hitch, and landed in Beijing at our scheduled time all along.

Further, we actually benefitted. Originally, we were to have about a 4-hour layover in Sf — but a short one in Narita requiring a mad dash from one gat to another. By accepting “the bump,” we got out of SF all the more quickly AND picked up extra time in Narita, giving us ample time to make the transit in a leisurely fashion.

Ari, did we deserve the $400 apiece compensation? I think not.

@Mekhong. I don’t understand your attitude about
“volunteering.” Giving up one’s seat because airlines routinely
overbook is not the same thing as “rendering a service” without
compensation. When I am waiting for a trip I paid for and they need
“volunteers” to be bumped, I agree to be bumped when the
compensation meets the level that is worth the lost time. For
example, $75 may not be enough to inconvenience the person who is
set to pick me up or the plans I have on the other side. But $300
may allow me to sufficiently accommodate my schedule. The idea of
the poor airline as a “single bidder” at an auction is absurd -
that airline took money from everyone sitting there in exchange for
a seat on that aircraft. When that airline oversells, it certainly
understands the risk it takes – that it will have to buy those
seats back at a premium.