That situation would not be a denied boarding situation, that would be the passenger refusing to pay the applicable fee and thus not being eligible to fly. The approach might have worked for getting ANA to rethink the fee, but if it did not it would just result in an off load and needing to rebook under the conditions of the ticket.

This would not be a denied boarding situation.

Lots of people post about antics they would engage in for fun and games.

But, the practical reality is that this was apparently a family TPAC trip. Confronted with the $600 tab in order to travel (and facing the purchase of new tickets and perhaps a hotel), it is easy to see one pulling out a card and paying.

My guess is that the carrier does this regularly. Only reason to bother checking the baggage manifest, a time-consuming and otherwise useless task.

SEA AC-NH transfer they paged to ask for my baggage tags, so presumably it's something they do with all transferring pax, and they would've clued in then

When you file your small claims court suit, name both airlines as defendants.(And be sure to get the spelling of the names correct.)

You would say that you followed all of the rules and directives (orders) and it would be fitting that you should not be subjected to additional fees or charges because of peculiar circumstances not normally encountered and that the airlines should work things out behind the scenes and to grant waivers and favors (I think you should use these words) to address these peculiar circumstances.

The following may be too technical to say to the judge in your opening paragraphs.

Air Canada had the responsibility of causing the bag to be transported for no more than the cost that would have been incurred had the passenger not been ordered to gate check the bag for the sole reason that cabin space was not available.

If All Nippon Airways is upholding the charge just because the baggage was not coded into the system in a certain way then ANA should have no problems accepting an amended recoding after the fact and refunding the charge.

Acceptable reasonss for not wanting vouchers as a settlement, may be too verbose to say to a judge:
a. I do not have travel plans that could make use of vouchers.
b. Restrictions and rules may prevent me from getting the full dollar value of this court case compared with ordinary purchase of tickets according to my tastes.
.....i. The voucher might not be valid for a certain promotional fare.
.....ii. A change to the reservation or ticketing may result in loss of the voucher value.

Classic "japanese go by the rulebook" ......... ANA should not charge you for this... wow... But this is a great lesson for people like me who travel a lot on regional european + long haul ANA... I will make sure they dont do this to me...

I don't think it will be a problem from Europe. There is not the same "gate check mania" in Europe as in North America. A bit on BA as they have an extremely generous carry on allowance, but on the typical Star Alliance partners connecting to NH is is quite rare.

I dont know, I connect from Eurowings to ANA and I have seen them doing this recently. Certainly I am not going to let them check my luggage after reading this...

True. I did not realise that ANA used Eurowings much. But I guess connecting to DUS LH mainline don't offer much. Though Eurowings does fall short of the Star Alliance partner criteria... :)

Eh, LX has tried to gate check my compliant carry on almost every time I've flown them intra-Schengen, despite me being *G near the front of the line + not exceeding my limits.

I guess it is a YMMV case. Though I constantly see people being chased in the US, I never really experience it in Europe.

Any update on this? Fascinating read.

I'd be tempted to do that too. The hassle in getting something like this refunded is just not worth it to me.

I doubt NH has ever forced checked passenger's bags. US airlines do it way too much, and AC does as well.
I would think you would file a claim basically stating that the AC agent lied, or you can try the route that they robbed you of $600.

Problem is, I'm not convinced it qualifies as IDB if you're refusing to comply with the CoC, which is how they'd spin it

I think you're confusing "IDB" in the sense of compensation for overbooking, and being involuntarily denied boarding, which this definitely would be.

Well I may have misread the response you quoted. I read "Otherwise, we go down the denied boarding route, we generate lots and lots of paperwork for everybody, and we get at least $600 of entertainment value out of the various responses." As saying they'd request IDB compensation afterwards, which I don't think would be possible