Originally Posted by Globaliser

Sorry, the line of the discussion has got obscured.

The question was whether, if you are on a bus between scheduled stops, you are entitled to demand that the bus driver deviate and pull into a town en route and let you off, on the basis that you don't want to be there any more and he would otherwise be guilty of false imprisonment. The answer to that is clearly no, and nobody seems to dispute that.

The same applies to the question whether, if you're on a NYC-AMS flight, you're entitled to demand that the pilot divert to a LON airport and let you off, with him being guilty of false imprisonment if he simply continues to the scheduled destination. Again, the answer is obviously no.

But why are you not entitled to demand this? The answer is because your contract is for carriage from NYC to AMS on the aircraft, or from one scheduled stop to another on the bus. That's why you have no entitlement to demand to make a shorter journey.

And it's the same even if your ticket includes a change of aircraft in London, or an intermediate scheduled stop on the bus. If your contract is for carriage from A to C, and carriage from A to the intermediate stop at B would have been more expensive, and you've agreed not to do that (as either the bus company's or airline's conditions might provide), then you're equally not entitled to demand to terminate at B and to get your checked baggage back there.

And some airlines do write this sort of thing in to their conditions - although it seems likely that BA does not.

I'm still tickled, though, by how a warning that's much more naturally directed at something else entirely is immediately interpreted here as an attack on something that many people do. Is the debate itself a sign of a guilty conscience? It makes me chuckle.