As the article posted previously explains, the airline DID inform passengers about the downgrade, but it may not have been able to reach some passengers that booked through a TA and/or if they didn’t provide their contact details to B0.
Did your contact details show up when you checked your booking on the B0 website before the flight?

1: The pictures you posted previously show the A321Neo business class configuration, not the B757 angle-flat seats that you would have experienced if B0 had operated the flight with the originally planned aircraft. If you had flown on the 757, would you still consider that a “bait and switch” since the seat would have been different from what you expected?

2: Had you looked up the B0 seatmaps ahead of time, you would have known that row 23 doesn’t exist on any of their aircraft, and you would have known that something wasn’t right.

Hello GFrye,

Benji wrote that article about my experience with La Compagnie. I provided him with all the documentation of what happened, and since most of that contained personal information (like the emails described below), he could not publish it. To answer your specific questions:

1) My travel agent did have my correct email address and they used it to send me the itinerary and receipt.
2) When I checked in online I again entered my contact information, and La Compagnie successfully used it to email me the boarding pass.
3) Later La Compagnie also had my correct contact information from calls to their service center, emails to their service center, and giving my business card to their NY gate agent. They did not respond to any of these until the government regulators and journalists started calling in August.

So when Benji asked La Compagnie to comment on what happened, they CLAIMED that they tried to contact all the passengers, which is very different from "DID". I have shown documentation that they had my correct contact information and just did not use it. To try to be fair to both sides, Benji published their response.

Also, let's look at this from La Compagnie's perspective. The web is full of stories of them changing or cancelling flights and not communicating with their customers (see previous posts). So when a journalist calls up and asks if they did it again, are they going to say, "yeah, we swapped out a plane at the last minute and did not have time to let people know". Given that this is an ongoing problem I suspect they are trying to spin it as well as they can, and claiming that my travel agent somehow sent them my wrong email address (after that same travel agent emailed the itinerary to my correct account), allows them to save some face.


There has been some talk about the difference between the business class seats on various La Compagnie airplanes. I am not really too fused about those details. Business class seats are big and recline nicely, sometimes all the way to flat. If they had put me in a business class seat that had a different style (pod versus open, partial recline vs lie-flat, etc.), then that would still be business class. Instead, I bought a big business class seat, and was given a small economy seat with any warning of notice of the change. So yes, that is a bait and switch.

It would have taken you a couple of minutes, which I’m sure is much less than the time you have spent posting here. Apparently, you had the time to join FT and flood this thread with posts, but you didn’t have time to spend two minutes researching B0 aircraft configurations.

As you posted earlier, had you known ahead of time that you wouldn’t be flying on B0 aircraft with the expected business class seats, you would have changed your booking. But you didn’t take the time to find out.

Some people are proactive when it comes to finding things out, while others expect to be spoon fed all information.

1. “La Compagnie seat map” in google —>. https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/La...nformation.php
2. Quickly check seat maps
3. Realize that row 23 doesn’t exist on B0’s own aircraft, and a switch may have occurred.

How long would it take you to perform those steps?

#2 deals with delays, cancellations and diversions.
Was your flight delayed?
Did your flight get cancelled or diverted?

As another poster pointed out, the original aircraft went tech on the inbound flight that was scheduled to arrive a few hours before your flight departed. I’m somewhat surprised that they managed to find a replacement aircraft on such short notice. Would you have preferred that they canceled your flight instead?

Your “point” was that you consider yourself to be a very busy person and therefore couldn’t spend two minutes to proactively verify that you’d be on B0’s aircraft. Like I said earlier, some people expect to be spoon fed everything.

You apparently have plenty of time to make over a dozen posts here, contact the DOT, and contact several journalists/bloggers, so you have invalidated your own “I didn’t have time to take proactive actions and therefore needed someone to spoon feed me everything” line of reasoning.

Since paragraph 2 specifically deals with delays, cancellations and diversions, it is obvious that those are the types of flight status changes they refer to in that paragraph.
Again, did your flight get delayed, cancelled or diverted?
Since B0 doesn’t have a ticket interlining agreement with any airline flying across the Atlantic, B0 would not have rebooked you for free. They would refund what you paid for your ticket, and then it would have been up to you to book a new last-minute, one-way business class ticket.
For reference, a same-day, one-way, nonstop business class ticket from Paris to New York today costs more than $5,600.

I agree. My post was a direct response to his "it would have been much better if they just cancelled the flight".
My question to him is if he thinks it would be "much better" if B0 canceling the flight would have cost him an additional $4,000 (> $5,500 for a new ticket, $1,500 refunded from B0) to travel that day.
Perhaps he is under the impression that B0 would have rebooked him for free on another airline if he had refused to board or the flight had been canceled.