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A comment on Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, delayed flights. Parent comment

Re:Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, dela... by sokoloff on Thursday April 25, 2024 @08:42AM (#40156797)
You're going to end up with some level of IDB'd (involuntarily denied boarding) passengers in any world where seats/safety equipment break, equipment changes, crew members get sick and/or time out and airline personnel need to be shuttled to crew another flight that would otherwise be entirely cancelled, or unexpected weather [higher than typical temperatures, unfavorable winds] or airport conditions [runway closures/temporary shortening] preclude a full gross weight takeoff.

As a passenger, I appreciate that my airfares are lower and some airfares have increased flexibility because the airlines have a deep understanding of the turn-up ratio and sell tickets in light of that fact. I appreciate the cases where [probably without my awareness] a flight or cabin crew/member [or maintenance tech and part] has been last-minute flown in to crew/fix a flight that I ended up taking rather than having it be cancelled.

Does it suck to be IDB'd? Sure. Does it happen often? Almost never (around 23 in a million or 1 in 44K embarkations). People in the US are about 5.5 times more likely to be killed in a car crash in a given year than be IDB'd on a given flight.

https://archive.is/YfLWG

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Re:Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, dela... by tacocataco on Thursday April 25, 2024 @02:48PM (#40161476)
Money moves mountains. There should be an auction for a cash refund to disembark.

The airlines just don't want to pay fair market value to get someone off the plane and they get to use violence to get their way.

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Re:Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, dela... by sokoloff on Thursday April 25, 2024 @03:57PM (#40162247)
From that link, passengers voluntarily taking the airline offers vastly exceeds those involuntarily denied (by a factor of almost 14:1 overall and many of the majors having exactly zero IDBs in that year).

That means the airline most frequently reaches an acceptable agreement to someone. You might wish that they used some other process, but the process they are using usually gets to an agreement as it is.

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