Originally Posted by
continentalclub
Some would say that the attitude of the airlines in the USA is somewhat lifeboated by their ability to enter into, familiarity with and, indeed, apparent enthusiasm for Chapter 11.
I do agree, however, that travel waivers are often handy, but US commercial aviation really is a wholly different beast to that of Europe, where volumes of passengers, frequency of service and alternative routings (on same carrier) are much lower, whilst overall consumer protection (at least currently) is much higher.
I'm not sure exactly how this supports the argument. The US carriers have realised that when things look like they're going bad that it's much better to give the customer the tools and flexibility to re-book themselves rather than wait until the last minute and then be forced to have enormous staffing resources available to sort things out.
It would seem to me if frequency of service and alternative routings are much lower and overall consumer protection much higher, that this would be even smarter for the European carriers. Less frequency means it's going to be even more difficult to recover from these sorts of disrutptions and more consumer protection means there's more on the line if you screw it up. Putting the power into the hands of the customer releives a lot of those stresses and is generally viewed as a positive by the customers themselves. What good in the world does it do you to tie a customer to a specific routing that has a high probability of irrops?