We need one of our legal beagles to help out on your points Angatol - my brain just isn't up to the challenge!

As interesting as the exchanges are, I think what has been missed is a large part of the "blame" for the widening of the obligations of airlines towards passengers (including those that many feel shouldn't be) was caused by the airlines themselves.

Many older travellers will recall that it wasn't too long ago that for almost any profit motivated operational change airlines made, they could simply duck responsibility by claiming sweepingly that it was for reasons outside their control, or even more vaguely "operational reasons" and customers basically just had to swallow it. Basically the lack of care they had to show when they simply changed their minds about something in order to optimise profit - irrespective of customer inconvenience - was relatively low compared to today.

The origins of this issue is partly due to their previous sins and against that context the current draconian regulations are a little easier to understand.

Even now, much of what passes for "outside of our control" is profit motivated lack of investment by someone along the line. This regulation places the obligation on the airline who can then make claims on companies like BAA, who will then eventually smell the coffee and make the investment rather than keep reimbursing BA and disrupting passengers.

I'm going to wind this up, because once you get to novel length posts, it's a sign things are getting out of hand.

Briefly:

You've used condescending language, called me a euro-sceptic, accused me of spouting clichés for the sake of it, misrepresented my position as not based in fact, you've stated that I advocate avoiding analysis, etc, etc.

That is not someone who is debating the issue, it is someone willing to use any tactic to make their point.

On the rest of your post, most of which has actually already been dealt with several times now, and indeed is still deliberately misrepresenting what I said or omitting things: (a) you confuse profitability with competitiveness; (b) my observations focus on historic precedence, which is factual; (c) the differential is what will be critical in a biased market and (d) you continue the fallacy that a made up number is "better" than an admission that exact costs cannot be predicted, but that historic precedent shows these can rise exponentially.

In terms of alternatives: many regulatory regimes have mechanisms for capping. There are also other policies conceivable that would protect consumers without having to create an arbitrary compensation regime that bears no relationship between the problem and the remedy.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B144 Safari/8536.25)

The attempt to focus overwhelmingly on contract law is a red herring (and a particular fetish of Internet fora?). Consumer protection is there to safeguard the rights of parties to a contract who are not equal and where competition (ergo choice) is low, giving one party to the contract little incentive to change behaviour.

You should get a refund, like in any other walk of life.

That's not a lot of use if you're stranded away from home _through no fault of your own_.

Compensation is perhaps the wrong term. Call it what it is, a punitive penalty designed to punish airlines that inconvenience their passengers. Airlines can legitimately avoid paying this by not inconveniencing their passengers in the first place.

... Assuming "circumstances beyond our control" is not a damages limitation included in the contract.

I think we (by which I mean 'I') are getting things a bit mixed. Assuming delays are a circumstance beyond the airlines control, as Monk is suggesting, then EU compensation is not payable is it? In that case the contract is not likely to be much help (in itself) either is it, as the circumstances being beyond control would exclude damages? So the passenger is going to have to rely on consumer protection built into the contract which makes the airline look after the passenger with hotel accomodation, meals and a rearranged flight etc.


Excellent Wikipedia reading BTW :)

Will do. My charging structure is somewhat unusual. I charge £100 to respond to 2 requests for information. What's your second request :)

As you would expect ... it isn't always that simple! :)

Firstly, "circumstances beyond our control" doesn't constitute immunity because of the lack of performance of of a supplier of BA ie BAA. When there is a bit of snow it might not be the snow that stops people flying but may instead by the lack of investment by BAA. This lack of investment is under the control of BA because BA can hold BAA liable for it's losses if BAA doesn't perform in compliance of the contract between them.

What has always been missing from a BA customer viewpoint is a compelling need for agression in the BA>BAA relationship because until the clarity of the regs BA customers could be fobbed off. Customers of BA cannot sue BAA if they do not perform as they have no direct contract with them. This took the heat to a degree off of BA. The reg has therefore become an incentive scheme for airlines to more closely manage airport operator contracts. This is even more important because of the monopoly situation that airlines are in with airport operators. Stuff that is genuinely outside everyone's control ie overwhelming snow that no operator could cope with is simply the collateral price of this incentive scheme.

Secondly consumer contract law is different from business to business contract law. In over simplistic terms any clause in a consumer booking contract is ignorable if the balance of power is unequal in the contract and/or if the specific clause is unfair therefore to the consumer. This might be of interest when BA takes commercial decisions which flights to cancel in favour of profit optimisation rather than plain fairness.

I have robustly questioned the cogency of the argument you put forward. That does not make it condescending.

Have I? Where? I spoke of having a good old Euro-rant. " insane rulings of the court", "mockery of the separation of powers": mmm..., that looks to me like a good old Euro-rant. You may well feel that it is a justified rant and you may or may not be right on this but that does not stop it from being a rant. Note that this is the argument being targetted, not the person.

Again where did I suggest that you were "spouting" clichés "for the sake of it"? I did indicate that, in my view, using the "compensation culture" in an argument was having recourse to a tired old cliché. Now if the "compensation culture" is not a cliché, then I do not know what a cliché is. Note again: the argument is targetted, not the person.


All I did was suggesting that your position is in my view indeed not based on fact nor serious analysis and I still hold that view.This is not a personal attack. This is not a misrepresentation. It is an evaluation of the cogency of the arguments you put forward and I have explained why I believe this to be the case. In my view, you still have not properly addressed the point:
if, by your own admission, you are unable to put any quantification whatsoever, however rough and tentative, on the impact of the Reg (indeed adamantly refuse to do so), if you have no clue as to even the order of magnitude of these costs, then how can you possibly conclude that the Reg will result in significant competitive disadvantage and, even more so, in bankruptcies?
If you cannot see where I see a flaw in the reasoning here, then we will get nowhere. It may be that there is a flaw in the objection I put forward here rather than in your reasoning. But if there is, it is not one that you have, imo, addressed.

And where have I ever suggested that we needed "exact costs"? Who is mis-representing whom?
All I said is that if you do not have the remotest idea what those costs are likely to be, whether they are more likely to be in the 1-2% range or the 40-50% range and how they compare in variability to other costs, you cannot determine the likely impact of those costs on the competitiveness of the airline and the likelihood of bankruptcy.
Just saying that impact studies are unreliable and that "historic precedent shows these can rise exponentially" is not enough to get you to your conclusion. Rising "exponentially" from a very low base can still keep it at a low base. You'd also need to be rather more fine-grained in your analysis, imo: establishing parallels with the error level in evaluating the cost of welfare policies without acknowledging the world of difference that there is in terms of complexity is, frankly, rather dubious.

I am happy to leave the argument at that and us agreeing to disagree. I do wish, however, that you could see that at no point was I ever attacking you personally and what I was having a go at was your arguments which I viewed, rightly or wrongly, as not cogent for the reasons I developed.

I think you should try the comedy circuit.