Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
Thanks for that quote, which is interesting for future reference. It's clearly an attempt to limit their financial exposure, but it also seems to me that they are mirroring BA's approach with this idea of "partner airlines" (I bet easyJet were surprised to read that!), like the JBA and oneworld relationships. Perhaps this is fair enough as a policy document, but it won't save FR from a strict reading of EC261 which make no such distinctions, it is fully biased in favour of the passengers and with no bias anywhere on keeping costs down for airlines.
I think this is a bigger issue that it looks: despite their reputation for "low fares" what always surprises me is how little the LCCs compete against each other. There aren't many routes where easyJet, Ryanair, Jet2 and Vueling compete head to head. LGW is a good example, there are just a few Ryanair flights to DUB, since this is seen as an easyJet stronghold. Therefore in many cases using legacy airlines such as BA is the only practical way forward.
I agree. I thought it interesting how the document was written in the form of try 1 and if unsuccessful (based on limits defined by FR) try 2 and so on as opposed to saying that passengers could select whichever option was going to give the best result.
Clearly an attempt to limit exposure on the part of FR but I am not sure how far they’d get if challenged on it. After all, a flight on BA in 4 hours is more likely to be in the customers best interest than a flight tomorrow on FR. Would be interesting to see whether the ‘same day or next’ limits would hold water in the event that they were challenged by a passenger who was offered rebooking on a flight tomorrow on FR but refused rebooking onto BA today.