Everyone has there opinion of how much stretching an airline should do. Avek's is obviously much closer to the airline's than most's but that's cool... Anyways, here's my 2 cents:

I don't think it was COs moral responsibility, I think it was the GAs moral responsibility. Sometimes mercy is the right way to go. I am a Delta flyer, and when I first started traveling heavily about a year ago, I didn't know all of the CoC rules. I was on a multiple leg trip TUL-MEM-MCO-TUL. I made it to MEM, and went to bed in my hotel, ready to go to MCO in the morning. I used the automated system in the hotel to get a wake-up call, and that was the only alarm I set. The power went out overnight and the system went down, leaving me to wake-up 5 hours after my flight. I rushed to the airport and got on standy. I got to ATL at noon, and after waiting for 4 MCO flights, I was going insane!!! I had to get out of ATL, so being a "youth," I went over to Terminal C and hopped on the next Airtran flight taking advantage of their X-fares. So, after a LONG day, I got home... I went to work Sunday morning and started working, but I decided that I would call DL to verify the rest of my itinerary. I was of course told it was cancelled etc... So I got on the phone... They said they wanted 600 dollars. I told them where to stick it, and got on WN. lol, to try to make an already too long story a little shorter, I wrote a 6 page letter to them asking for mercy and was given a refund for the portion of my trip that I had not used ($260).

This was totally my fault. I should have set another alarm. The point is... there are rules to prevent misuse of the system, and the Establishment cannot present themselves as bending the rules all the time, but a person within the group should be able to bend and flex.

The moral of my story: People are people, and people screw up. If there was a seat on the flight... they should have put him on, IMHO.