Originally Posted by
STS-134
That's not how it works. Compensatory Damages are ordered to force the breaching party to pay the other party enough money to get what they were promised in the contract elsewhere. If you hire someone to fix your car for $1000 but the person bails, and the only other person you can find will do it for $1500, and the $1500 price is found to be reasonable, the first person would likely be ordered to pay you $1000 in Restitution and $500 in Compensatory Damages, for example. If you can find someone else who will do it for $900, then you'd still get $1000 in Restitution and you'd be able to pocket the $100 savings.
I agree regarding the calculation of damages (that is, it isn’t automatically whatever the price difference was), but I felt compelled to comment on the analogy here since it’s quite the opposite of how the airlines actually work. If you buy a ticket well in advance (maybe you’ve even paid a premium for a nonstop or an early morning), and the airline changes the schedule or routing so as to be unpalatable, all they owe you is a refund of the original price, never mind that they’ve had your money interest free for months, or that a similar ticket on another airline now costs twice as much. As mentioned in some examples already, some routings cost a premium over others (maybe there’s a new flagship lounge in their big hub), but of course we’re only selling you A to B and the exact routing isn’t guaranteed. And feel free to pay extra for a certain seat assignment, but don’t expect those to be guaranteed either. Maybe the public would have more sympathy for the airlines on this issue if they didn’t routinely pull shenanigans like these.
So, in short, I don’t personally do it, but I find it hard to think of those that do as being thieves. Yes, you agreed to the CoC when buying the ticket, but what kind of world is it where you even have to agree to 15 pages of legalese just to buy an airline ticket?
The IRROPS example also got me thinking. As in the example someone posted, if you booked XXX-IAH-AUS and the IAH-AUS flight got delayed 7 hours so you decided to drive instead, you’d be owed a refund of that segment. But what if XXX-IAH actually cost more than XXX-IAH-AUS? Does the last segment have value, or not?