Originally Posted by
Kgmm77
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)
There's no doubt the legislation has had unintended consequences that are unfairly penal to the industry BUT had that very same airline industry treated it's customers consistently in a fair and equitable manner then legislation wouldn't have been required. Such is the case with all consumer protection legislation. Also, all customers don't need equal protection, and as a number of posters have previously highlighted before, the FT demographic is clearly at the lesser need of protection end of the scale.
Bottom line (IMO): there WAS a problem. The current legislation is a hammer to crack a nut, BUT history has proven airlines left to their own devices don't show the required level of customer care.
^^^^
we only have to look at how many try to wriggle out of their legal requirements, even when that requirement is defined, to know how well consumers would be protected without that requirement.
andset1911's idea of putting a number of days limit on it was reasonable - although given FR's 'the first available flight is in a week' response, there would need to be some kind of FR exemption.