dilanesp

SCSA, I'm not commenting on what you "could" have done. I'm talking about the law.

If you go into an American court and argue "the purchaser's representation was material because without it, I wouldn't have offered the fare", that's a winning argument. It's still a winning argument even if there were 1 or 2 other representations one could have made to get the same fare. The point is, because you had to make some representation to get the fare, making that representation becomes material to the transaction.

If you would like me to march you down to a law library, we can look this up in a contracts treatise.

Materiality of a representation, under US contract law, CAN be established by the fact that the seller is going to use the information for some purpose, but it can also be established by the fact that it was necessary to induce the seller to enter the transaction. That's enough.

Now, as I said, you guys are pursuing this in Europe. And in Europe, the law may be different. I don't know anything about European contract laws. I wish you success.

Finally, on the ruling itself, (1) i said it was flawed-- the "not offered to US consumers" ruling is terrible; (2) however, other than the terminological choice "bad faith", which I would not have said, the portion of the ruling dealing with user conduct seems entirely defensible to me; and (3) some pragmatism is more defensible than other pragmatism.

To expand a bit on (3), I think it was inevitable and defensible that the DOT was going to consider that a lot of consumers messed with the billing address and country of purchase settings to get the fare, for reasons I won't repeat but which I stated upthread. On the other hand, the "not offered to US consumers" ruling looks to me like bad pragmatism-- they didn't want to order United to honor tickets booked by Danish consumers, so they came up with a fig leaf.