Duke787

Delete. 3 years on and I can't stand the blog. If only one could hide it from BA.

Euteanzoic7216

Matt is a spoiled trust fund kid. Plus, all of his posts now about Africa are posts he previously posted on Upgrd a year ago, so it's not new material. Personally, I would have liked Upgrd to remain independent. I particularly like Rocky (doublewidesfly) and Rohan (aeRO'space).

sbm12

There have been a bunch of even older posts, like meals from airlines/routes not operating any more.

Rohan is posting a decent amount at Airways News IIRC.

MatthewLAX

Careful about posting under two handles...

First, my father was a high school math teacher. Wish I was a trust fund baby, but I'm far from it.

Two, nothing has been recycled from UPGRD. I am posting older trip reports for a very deliberate reason I laid out on my blog. If you don't like it, there are 2-3 non-Africa posts each day and the Africa report is almost over.

You mean the Meal of the Weeks posts? Those are meant to be historic. And still more interesting than many other posts on the site...

Raffles

On your site or the broader BA site ?

MatthewLAX

Both! I love writing about airline meals -- both old and new -- and judging by the clicks, others do to!

Canarsie

...so in other words in terms of your articles pertaining to airline meals, your readers just eat ’em up...

RFDMinnesota

I REALLY wish you hadn't retorted with "the clicks"...

I dare say that I was about to voice some support and agree with the poster that mentioned you as a positive addition!

But then ya went all RenesPoints on us...

Maybe I picked a bad day to visit FT again. I guess 3 months wasn't enough

Adam1222

Just deleted Live and Let's Fly from my feed due to Matthew's poor behavior with respect to his Ethiopian mistake fare.

Despite being told multiple times his mistake fare was canceled, which he had known was a mistake fare, he flew to Bangkok anywhere to "challenge" aka waste the time of Ethiopian's crew at Bangkok, and attempt to gin up moral outrage, and the "power imbalance."

It's pretty rich to talk about power imbalance when you have enough disposable time and income to fly to Bangkok for no reason other than getting into a fight with an airline's staff.

This kind of behavior leads to problems in the end, and is part of what has made Flyertalk worse over the past few years: bloggers mislead people into thinking they have the right to behave this way, and forget the first principle of mistake fares -- assume it will be canceled, if it doesn't work out, be prepared to smile and move on (if not immediately, after 5 or 6 arguments over several months).

nineworldseries

Several months ago, I didn't think Boarding Area could get any worse, and we had reached the bottom of the barrel.

I was wrong.

Duke787

Fully agree with that. The tone of the Ethiopian series was cringe-worthy.

I understand the annoyance with a mistake fare gone south especially if the company is still holding the money but the holier than thou POV was painful to read.

Raffles

Whilst I know US law has its own quirks, EU law allows an airline to cancel your flight up to 14 days before departure with no comeback whatsoever, as long as they refund your money. There is no obligation to reroute you. You have no rights on a non-mistake fare, yet alone a mistake fare.

Adam1222

that's not really relevant here. That's about cancelling flights, not about cancellation of specific tickets while keeping the flight going. The US rules, which became more airline friendly as a result of people taking advantage of mistake fares with feelings of entitlement, focus on whether you were informed and given an opportunity to cancel. Consumer protection laws are weakened when people pretend they were designed to protect rich people who want to fly on a mistake business class fare mileage runs.

84fiero

I've won some and lost some on mistake fares. You generally just have to roll with the punches.

I'm not saying there couldn't be some incidents where it's not an obvious mistake and the airline tries to weasel out - where you might file a complaint with any applicable regulatory agency. But those are pretty rare and even those wouldn't call for shenanigans like L&LF is doing.

I do think that the airlines should be held to the same time standard as customers to unilaterally cancel a ticket without penalty. So for example for US ticket sales, customers can't cancel or change after 24 hours without paying any change or cancel fees - so then airlines selling US tickets also have 24 hours to claim a mistake and cancel, otherwise they're held to the ticket. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

But nothing about this stunt (which is just what it is) that L&LF is pulling will do anything to change any laws or regulations (Canadian regs would apply anyway to his ticket). I'm not sure what his purpose was, other than creating some drama to generate clicks.

Astrophsx

Completely agree, and also very tasteless to post a photo of the agent working behind the desk who he felt could have done more to get him on the plane. Seems like there were several of his readers that found this all in good entertainment and were telling him he should be suing. There is testing the limits and then there is going beyond them.