Originally Posted by StayingHomeIsBetter

I think your attempt to draw parallels to normal business relationships is a stretch.

Why do people get so emotional? I'll tell you why I get emotional:

Show me another business relationship that is so disproportionately biased to the benefit of one party. You said you own your own business. Would you enter into a contract where the other party reserved the right to rewrite the terms at any time, in any way that he chose... solely to his advantage and solely at his option? And you had no recourse but to accept. And then he did so, time and time again. Yet, every airline has this ability in their T&Cs. So, not only is the "contract" inherently unjust, there is no place that the consumer can go to find a more just option.

Avoidance of virtually any responsibility for failure to deliver the contracted product... Can you think of any business that has protected it itself to the degree that the airline industry has insofar as being able substitute a less valuable product, or just fail to deliver the product, with no risk to itself? "Yes we know we sold you a seat on a mainline jet direct from A to B, but we have elected to put you on an RJ from A to C and from C to D, and then there is a bus from D to B" and since we got you from A to B, we are off the hook." And if the airline, through its own negligence fails to be able to make a flight, and even if you manage to get a refund of the fare, the airline can still deny financial responsibility for the thousands of dollars in income that you have lost because you could not get to your client. Would you deal with any other business that had provided itself iron-clad protection against having to make you whole for your losses that their incompetence had caused? We are not talking force majeure here. Just absolute immunity from the consequences of incompetence.

I could go on but, at the end of the day, your premise of trying to relate this to any normal business relationship IMHO breaks down.

I too own my own business, and I would be out of business if I ran it this way.

The airlines have a monopoly on the ability to get you from one point to another faster than any other available means. And they take advantage of that monopoly by dictating the terms of what "customer service" means to them as they all seek a state of equal mediocrity, because they have given up trying to make a profit while providing true customer focus... the two concepts seem to have been totally divorced in their thinking.

And, at the end of the day, I find it disconcerting that the industry that I rely upon to suspend me in a thin metal tube, tens of thousands of feet in the air, for hours at a time, is willing to settle for mediocrity in anything that it does.