Stranded? Who pays when air travel breaks
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) got stranded overnight after a backhoe severed a single fiber optic cable, knocking out air traffic control across much of the eastern US. His airline declined to pay for the hotel. In this episode, he walks through who actually owes you what when air travel breaks: federal refund rules, the airlines' "controllable delay" commitments, credit card trip delay coverage, and the goodwill credit a well-placed phone call can unlock. Along the way, he explains why checkout-page travel insurance pays back only about 40 cents on the dollar and why 5,000 apology miles are worth about $60.
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(00:38) A severed fiber cable and a double misconnect
(02:25) The dangerous professional approach to travel disruption
(05:09) Delay codes and why the cause matters
(06:57) Tiered customer service at airlines
(08:29) Who to talk to at the airport
(12:03) Remote customer support and the trouble with chat
(17:02) Waterfall item one: the DOT automatic refund rule
(19:38) Sponsors: Mercury | Granola
(22:57) Waterfall item two: airline commitments and controllable causes
(26:18) Waterfall item three: why paid travel insurance is a bad product
(30:05) Credit card travel benefits
(32:37) Waterfall item four: asking the airline for a goodwill credit
(36:17) Politeness, magic words, and negotiating the credit
(39:24) Last resorts: DOT complaints and small claims court
(41:02) Wrap
Transcript
This transcript will be annotated in Patrick’s usual style by the end of this week — be sure to check back.
Patrick: Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does.
Hideho, everyone. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the internet. This past weekend, I was at Overhang, a conference in Washington, D.C., which brought San Francisco Bay Area AI insiders together with policymakers and other people professionally involved in AI policy in Washington for the purpose of helping out with mutual understanding, which is not the topic of this episode.
A severed fiber cable and a double misconnect
The topic of this episode is air travel infrastructure and the financialization of failures of it, because on Monday, September 21st, the day I was supposed to go home to my family, there was something of a mishap next to what appears to be an Amtrak rail line on the Eastern Seaboard, and that resulted in cutting a single-point-of-failure fiber optic cable, which took down air traffic control over a large portion of the Eastern United States, which had some important consequences and some less important ones.
One of the least important consequences was that my flight home to Chicago, connecting through Detroit, had what's called a misconnect in the middle of the day. A misconnect is when we predict that your time into the airport that you're going to have the layover at will not successfully get you on the plane that you were expected to board there.
And so the airline offered a rebooking. I then rebooked to a different flight from Atlanta late in the evening, transiting through Atlanta, and then had a second misconnect and ended up staying overnight at a hotel. Somewhat surprisingly to me, the airline told me, "Well, we're not going to actually pay for that," in the first encounter that I had with them.
They said that they only pay for it if it is their fault that someone is delayed overnight. And they said, "Well, the air traffic control issue is out of our hands." And interestingly, there are about five different regimes that govern whether a customer is made whole in the case of airline or aircraft-oriented travel disruption.
So I thought I would talk through what is essentially the loss waterfall between those regimes, both from a perspective of, well, this is intellectually interesting, and also from a perspective of, this can actually save you money if you know how to do it well.
The dangerous professional approach to travel disruption
So I'll start off with the usual dangerous professional injunction.
Dangerous professional, if you haven't followed my writing on this for the last couple of years, is kind of this somewhat winking way to describe the type of person who keeps careful notes with the intention of eventually bringing them to the attention of people in positions of authority. It does help to have sort of a dangerous professional mien when dealing with airline staff and other people that you're dealing with in the course of a travel disruption.
However, in many cases of being a dangerous professional, you're trying to maximize for the sort of expected value of an interaction like a regulatory intervention or a suit or similar, or your counterparties sort of worry about the expected value of a regulatory intervention or a civil suit. This is not true with respect to airline disruptions, because travel disruption is so routine and regimented.
And so the thing that you're trying to assume the persona of the dangerous professional for is just to be efficient with how you deal with people and to route the questions to the right layer of the bureaucracy, such that you get satisfaction very quickly and hopefully at a low stress. The other thing I would mention is that this sort of thing does not have to be resolved at the airport, which is something of a surprise for people.
They might assume that, well, after the airline finally gets you home, you and the airline are even, which is not even close to true. But the sort of general strategy one would have is to keep moving at the airport during a travel disruption, keep attempting to use self-service tools and similar to rebook you onto the available flights on the same carrier, and then you kind of only accept being paused when that will result in a much better outcome for you.
This also tends to help travelers that are well-capitalized and similar, that can pay for a night in the hotel confident in the knowledge that somebody will reimburse them for the night in the hotel later. That simply is what it is: there is no necessity that the structure that we have built maximizes for fairness across the panoply of people of different financial statuses, sophistications, et cetera, et cetera.
And indeed, there's going to be much talk in discussing the redress waterfall and how the anticipated cost of redress on behalf of the airline and insurance companies and others that are involved here is predicated on very many people not optimally enforcing rights or contractual obligations that are owed them.
Delay codes and why the cause matters
So let's go to the waterfall. Many things can cause a travel disruption, and if you're IATA, which is an international association, you've tried to cram down that complexity of millions of things that could possibly go wrong into one of about, oh, forty or so documented numeric codes. A lot of the industry will type those codes into a system somewhere and then get them squished through other systems, which evaluate those codes and maybe do some sort of recursive graph lookup on other flights involved in an itinerary, et cetera, et cetera, to compress them down to one of a very small number of human-legible reasons that the plane was delayed.
And so at one point, someone tried to claim to me that my travel was disrupted as a result of the aircraft coming in being late, which might have been true as they understood it in the moment, but institutionally, the airline believes that it was affected by an air traffic control issue downstream of that unfortunate backhoe incident, as I mentioned earlier.
But it's useful to understand that in the regulatory regime that prevails in the United States, the reason for a travel disruption will turn on some parties' liabilities and it will turn off others. This is less the case in some other regulatory regimes. For example, in Europe, in the case of a delay past a certain point, irrespective of reason, it's the airline's job to compensate the customer.
And that is a regulatory regime one can be under. This also applies to, say, flights taking Americans back home after they've been in Europe. But I'll mostly be discussing the US case, partly because it's the one I understand best and partly because, if I look at the stats for Complex Systems listeners, American domestic travel is going to be number one with a bullet in terms of planes people are getting on.
Tiered customer service at airlines
Before we get to the recovery waterfall, I want to speak briefly about a bit of an ethnographic understanding of scaled customer service processes, which the airline industry has many, many, many people working customer service for. Broadly speaking, if you've followed my past writing on Seeing Like a Bank, you might understand that there are different tiers of service available within a customer service organization.
The airline industry largely uses this, in part because they understand, to a degree which is much more true for them than it is for most businesses, that the customer mix is heterogeneous, and that the customers are known at the moment as to what variety of heterogeneity they represent. The airlines largely capture this by frequent flyer mileage status, but they have a number of other things that they can display on the screen of a customer service representative, such as your lifetime miles flown on the airline, your lifetime spend on tickets on the airline, et cetera, et cetera.
And also whether you book directly with the airline versus book through a low-cost travel agent or similar. They would prefer you book directly. That tends to work out well for them. At any rate, the airline... Well, how to put this gently? There's a finite amount of human capital in the world, and the airline preferentially allocates high human capital operators to dealing with customers that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on air travel over the course of their lifetimes versus people who are buying their one leisure ticket every couple of years.
Who to talk to at the airport
And so, generally speaking, here's your prioritization strategy for "Who should I talk to at the airline to get the thing I want done, done?" You should talk to the gate agent if and only if talking to the gate agent gets you on the plane that is leaving out of that gate right now. Gate agents are sort of compensated and managed just to arrange on-time departures.
And keeping an airplane on the ground for 15 minutes as you wait for the last straggler is extraordinarily expensive for the airline, both in terms of burned staff time, fuel, et cetera, et cetera, and in the downstream consequences on the network if this plane doesn't get into Newark in time to fly out from Newark with whatever crop of passengers that it picks up there.
So you can sometimes have a question which helps a gate agent get their plane out the door faster, and if so, definitely get in line and ask them. If you don't, be a good citizen and try to resolve through other pathways. If it isn't something that gets a plane out faster, but it is something that rebooks you to another plane on the same airline, the self-help tool that is available in the airline's app or website of choice is phenomenal.
They largely, but not 100%, show the same inventory available to you as the user of the app as they would show to an agent at the airport attempting to help you out. And they act very quickly, because for whatever reason, it seems to just require less taps to book a ticket as a user buying one on your cellphone than it does at the ancient DOS-based system that they use for airline terminals.
So avail yourself of the self-help option if all you need is, "There's probably another flight that gets me in today, and I'll be happy to take it." Note that rebooking trades off some but not all of your procedural rights. So in the case where, as we discuss later, you have procedural rights, accepting a rebooking offer on behalf of the airline waives some rights to compensation in some cases.
But often it's the highest expected value thing that you can do. In most cases, you just wanna get home, or you just wanna get to that destination as quickly as possible, and this will get you there as quickly as possible.
Okay. So if you're not talking to the gate agent and you're not using the app, where are you going to find the most empowered person in the organization that can help you do something which might require some amount of discretionary logic?
First answer is at the airport, not at the gate. You're looking for either the staff that are in the frequent flyer lounge or the staff that are staffing one of the help desks. Different airlines call them different things, but for example, Delta might call them the Red Team. The staff who are helping at the frequent flyer lounge will often respond to someone who presents as a passenger in distress, even if they are not eligible to use the frequent flyer lounge.
And that is, by the way, true of very many sort of status-gated ways to access services at airlines, banks, and other things, and is a good thing to keep in the back of your head. And you can either lead with the fact that you're not in the lounge or say, "I just have a quick question," explain the question here, and let them inquire whether you have the status.
Usually they won't inquire for that, because these people are trained to give good customer service. And who knows? The person that is not a paying member of one of the credit cards that will allow you lounge access today might be next year. But they probably won't be using this lounge again if they have a terrible day today.
Remote customer support and the trouble with chat
So if you can't resolve it with somebody at the airport, who, again, is in one of those places where they will have relatively high status, relatively well-trained, relatively higher discretion representatives, then you move to using remote customer support. And here be dragons. By far, the best customer support experiences you'll get remote from an airline are from the elite status tiers of their frequent flyer numbers. You can Google for, for example, "What is the Diamond status tier for airline blah, blah, blah," and get the special 1-800 number, which is reserved to them. However, often an automated system or the rep themselves will confirm that you are a Diamond member prior to accessing that line, and if not, shuffle you down into the general customer service queue, which is staffed by lower human capital agents.
And they often might have the bottom tier or no-status part of the queue staffed at, for example, an international outsourced office versus being staffed by domestic representatives. I have nothing against the notion of globalizing the customer support experience. I've worked for companies that have done it.
There are excellent cost control and coverage reasons to do it. However, when you are trying to get something even a little bit irregular, it is just a fact that the people who work domestically on the sort of higher tiers of the customer service organization have more buttons available to them that do things that you want.
And the people that work in a third-party call center internationally largely don't have the same buttons. And so their options are either tell you no or write up a ticket that will hopefully end up in a queue serviced by a higher status, more agency person. A lifetime of experience with customer support has told me that I am better at writing tickets for people that are working in the higher levels of customer support organizations than the typical member of tier one support is in the usual suspects for international customer support outsourcing.
And so I would suggest that you avoid calling into those when you can. Importantly, I don't know exactly why this is true, but I have some guesses based on the sort of economics of scaled customer service delivery: the 24/7 "chat with us" button in the app, which a lot of people reach for because of perceived immediacy, almost invariably goes to an outsourced customer service agency in a foreign destination.
For the same reasons, you will not, generally speaking, get the best experience from them. I tried the chat with the app thing just on the chance that one of the asks I had was relatively straightforward, which was that after using the self-service rebook feature after my first misconnect, I got a push notification saying that I was rebooked onto the flight going to Atlanta, but the app itself didn't show that on my ticket.
I thought, oh, well, I would sure like to know if the airline understands me as flying to Atlanta today, because if they don't, that would be a problem. And so I opened up chat and asked if the chat representative had a view in their database as to whether I had a ticket to Atlanta or not. And the chat representative wrote back with two very obviously templated responses, where the templates included places where the representative was supposed to take out words from the template.
So for example, put brackets or parentheses around "delayed slash canceled slash misconnected." And the representative is supposed to choose one of those and then hit the backspace key. And they did that successful edit in neither of the two opportunities to do so. So I suspect, given some background knowledge of this and what those messages said, that those messages were drafted by compliance to preserve the written record for things like the Department of Transportation mandatory automatic refund.
But we shall discuss that more in a moment. And avoid text-based chat where you can. This is one of the few cases where this dangerous professional prefers to talk to people on the telephone. You can also do a fallback to paper letters to customer service if you're trying to get redress after leaving the airport.
But honestly, given the relative dollar amount of these things and the fact that it is a sort of highly regimented, high-volume decision making anyhow, I would default to a call in most cases versus the letter. Now, granted, if you're doing this for a family reservation of six seats in business class flying internationally, there might be enough dollars on the line that you would prefer the letter route versus the call route, just for any incrementality and likelihood of getting the outcome you desire.
Waterfall item one: the DOT automatic refund rule
All right, let's get to the waterfall. So there are many organizations that could be, as the financial industry would say, wearing the liability for either the direct cost of alternate transportation for yourself, for a refund, or for incidental expenses that you incur as a result of travel disruption.
We start the waterfall with ones which don't require you to have any particular status with the airline. These work the same for everybody, because they're creatures of statute rather than creatures of a customer service revenue maximization exercise. So we'll start with the government mandates.
The Department of Transportation finalized a rule for automatic refunds in April 2024 and then Congress codified it in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. And they've eliminated part of the rule about cash compensation, but they will enforce the refund part of the rule.
And so you are guaranteed a refund, which you will get, again, by asking the airline for it and perhaps citing your knowledge of this rule, rather than by calling Washington, D.C. and hoping Congress takes action on your behalf. You are guaranteed a refund if either the flight that you attempted to board is canceled or there is a significant change.
And, very importantly, when the airline offers you an alternative, you decline it. So you're entitled to the cash refund to your original form of payment, inclusive of taxes and fees. What does significant change mean? It means a couple of things, but here are the really salient ones. A departure or arrival moves more than three hours domestically or six hours internationally.
A different departure or arrival airport. I was flying into O'Hare, but if they had rebooked me to Midway, that's a significant change, even though from the perspective of someone using cabs in Chicago, that isn't the world's most significant change. An increase in the number of connections that you require to reach your destination, or a downgrade in the cabin of service.
So the refund is due within seven business days for card purchases, twenty days otherwise, and it should be automatic. You don't even have to ask for it. The airline is supposed to tell you that you're eligible for it. Well, I'm sure they do their level best in attempting to tell everyone in the customer service and operations enterprise that is the airline that this is supposed to be automatic and that customers are entitled to be told their rights here.
This is cause-blind. So it doesn't matter whether this was caused by an air traffic control failure, a weather incident, a declaration of war, whatever it is. Should be an automatic refund.
Waterfall item two: airline commitments and controllable causes
Waterfall item number two is a carrier's public or contractual, quote-unquote, voluntary commitments. So after 2022, the Secretary of the Department of Transportation wrote to airline CEOs and said, "Hey, guys, what can you do to make this better here? I want you to make some public commitments as to things that you will do for your travelers, and then I'm going to publish them on a Department of Transportation online dashboard, and then we will hold you to those public commitments."
The dashboard is available at flightrights.gov, which is a 301 redirect into some webpage at the Department of Transportation. I don't think that actually reading through that checklist is a great use of your time. But the important thing is that these are voluntary commitments that are upgraded by the sort of nature of them being voluntary commitments between the passenger, the airline, and the government.
But these start to become less cause-blind than the mandatory refunds. And so the big factor that determines whether the airline commitments under this are going to be activated or not is whether the cause was controllable for the airline. So the controllable causes include crew issues. The most common one here is that the airline had a crew that was scheduled to fly the airplane, but one or more members of that crew either couldn't make it to the physical location on time because they had their own travel disruptions, or one or more members of that crew, quote-unquote, timed out.
Maintenance issues, cleaning issues, fueling issues, baggage loading. Uncontrollable causes include things like the weather, air traffic control, ground stops, government-initiated actions of all sorts, et cetera, et cetera. And so, again, referencing the fact that the airlines are seeing like an airline, they have an internal code that says, for every flight that they've flown in the last couple of decades, what, if anything, caused it to be delayed or canceled.
And you're going to have a squish down from that list of 40-ish ultimate causes down into the binary question of: was this controllable or uncontrollable for the airline? And again, many of the airline commitments are secondary in priority to "unless the customer agrees otherwise, dot, dot, dot." You have to be careful to not accidentally agree otherwise if it matters to you.
Again, when you're just trying to get home as quickly as possible, usually it is in your best interest to just quickly agree to rebooking a flight. But a thing the airline can and will do is to say, "Well, the customer agreed that we would not pay them for the night in the hotel, because we explained our policy to them."
In that case, you have waived your right to compensation for the night in the hotel, if you are otherwise entitled to that under the commitment that they made with the Department of Transportation. Now, good news: even if you waive your quote-unquote right with respect to the airline, you might get paid either by a different actor, as we'll discuss in a moment, or by the airline through a different pathway. So let's go on to those.
Waterfall item three: why paid travel insurance is a bad product
Number three, you might have purchased travel insurance, and if you didn't, great job. Travel insurance is a really bad product for almost all travelers almost all of the time. The limited thin read I could think of is if you are, say, of Social Security age and in poor health, the possibility of a medical evacuation, which will typically run six figures or more during an international vacation, would be really, really un-fun.
And so in that case, it might be sensible to get travel insurance, specifically insuring you against the possibility of a medical evacuation. The other thing that could happen is, say you have a destination wedding or similar. If you are insuring not just the cost of the flight, but the cost of an event, where that cost of an event is large relative to your financial resources, that could hypothetically be reasonable.
The checkout page for your airline will attempt to sell you a different kind of insurance, and it will cost typically five to ten percent of the ticket price. And they'll say, "Well, if you don't pay for trip interruption insurance for five or ten percent of the ticket price, we might charge you for another ticket. Oh, no. Please pay us five to ten percent." You probably shouldn't buy that one.
Reasons why? Well, one is that the insurance is ungenerous. So the basic theory of insurance for almost all types of insurance, and we'll bracket health insurance here, is that there is a pool of risk, and we can increase aggregate expected value over the pool by decreasing very high, tough-to-be-knowable-in-advance expenses to some members of the pool, by sort of spreading that risk over the pool.
And so there's a bit of other-than-linear pain as one encounters the price from those shocking high-severity, low-risk events. So the risk of someone dropping dead in their 30s from a previously unknown condition, getting hit by a bus, et cetera, et cetera. Term life insurance: one of the best products that the financial industry offers.
One of the ways that you can mathematically know that term life insurance is one of the best products the financial industry offers is that it has a high loss ratio. So a loss ratio is: of a dollar of premiums that we take in, how many cents go back to the class of policyholders? And so loss ratio for term life insurance might be something like 95 cents or so.
And this will vary based on a lot of factors, but take that as a fingers-in-the-wind approximation. And broadly, for property casualty insurers, 80 cents to 90 cents is fairly common. And for travel insurance, it's about 40 cents. Why is that? Well, of the dollar of premium, they pay an awful lot of it to the distributor, which will either be the airline offering it to you in the checkout flow or the company that operates the kiosk that sells it to you at the airport.
This is just a really bad product. The customer complaints about it are legion. You can read many, many exposés and government reports about this fact. The insurance companies have an expansive view of the number of things that can cause them to deny a claim. And the process of doing a claim is intentionally designed, I think, to cause more friction, with that friction decreasing the amount of claims they'll have to pay out, and therefore increasing the profitability of the insurance at various levels.
So again, unless you have a specific thing that you're insuring, versus just insuring the fact of the trip itself, I would skip paid-for travel insurance.
Credit card travel benefits
I would not skip card benefits, which often say, "Well, the reason travel insurance is so lucrative is that the risk involved is so small. We can just give everyone travel insurance that uses our card to pay for it, and then fund that out of the combination of very few people that are eligible for the travel insurance will successfully make use of the insurance, plus, to the extent that there's an actual premium owed here, we can just deduct it from interchange," which will be, we'll call it 3% of the total value of the ticket that they paid for on our card.
So travel insurance used to be kind of de rigueur for gold cards and up. That's been slightly walked back over the years. You'll have to actually check your card whether it still offers it. But premium cards like the American Expresses of many varieties, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, et cetera, have travel insurance bundled, and it's often quite generous.
And so, for example, the Chase Sapphire Reserve says that it will pay out your lodging expenses for any stay overnight necessitated as a result of disrupted travel. And then, in the case where it's a delay versus a delay overnight, there's a sort of tiered level based on what exactly type of card you have.
So read the thing that your website and/or app tells you. It's kind of important. But the actual mechanics of getting this: first, you go to the airline and ask them to generate a letter for you verifying that your trip was in fact delayed. And that's something you can get by calling the 1-800 number, or they might have instructions on their website for doing that.
And then you upload that letter into a portal that is provided by your credit card company. That will typically actually be done by an outsourced customer service or BPO, business process outsourcing, shop, but you don't really care so much about that detail. You probably just care about getting paid.
The typical way that they will pay you is to cut you a check some weeks later. Like many kinds of insurance, the industry would prefer that you not double-dip. So they don't want the case where you get compensated by the airline and also compensated by a paid-for travel insurance and also compensated by your credit card travel insurance.
That said, this is a high-volume thing, and so they're likely going to trust the representation made in the letter from the airline that "we have not compensated this person yet," and that will be standard language in the trip delay letter.
Waterfall item four: asking the airline for a goodwill credit
Okay, next part of the waterfall. We go back to the airline, but instead of saying we would like compensation, we say that we would like some sort of adjustment. This is called different things in different customer service shops: an accommodation, an adjustment. There's a beautiful French phrase, geste commercial, a commercial gesture.
So this is asking the airline to do something in the interest of customer goodwill. The airline is most likely going to try to make the commercial gesture using a pseudo-currency that it controls the issuance of, because that makes the cost of it less.
And so the first thing they will reach for is, "We're so sorry that happened to you. Can we make it up to you by giving you airline miles?" The second thing they will reach for is, "We're so sorry that happened for you. How about a dollar-denominated credit on your next flight with us?" An e-certificate or similar.
Exactly what this is called depends on the airline. In general, you should prefer to get the dollar-denominated thing versus the miles-denominated thing. Miles are worth about 1.2 cents to 1.5 cents given optimal execution of the miles, which will often be upgrading yourself to premium service, and that is relatively difficult for many people to do. But it's useful to hold the idea in your head that if the airline has just offered you 5,000 miles as a gesture of customer goodwill, then they're offering you plus or minus $60, and they're offering it in that format because it will cost them less than $60 to actually give that to you.
So clearly you do not wanna get 5,000 goodwill miles if you spent $300 on an airport hotel overnight to keep yourself cozy. Again, as I discussed earlier, calling into the upper levels of the airline's status infrastructure will get you better results with regards to asking for an adjustment like this than calling into lower levels. Although it is typically printed on the physical screen that the agent will be reading, it's good to front-load the request with, look, give the best fact about yourself that is relevant, and then "This is the first time this has happened to me."
They sort of don't want someone who is optimally executing on getting a $300 credit every time they're inconvenienced by the airline. Though there is a number of plane flights you can take at which "every time you call, you get a $300 credit" makes excellent sense for everybody.
But thank goodness I'm not flying that much. So a way to phrase this is, "Look, I've flown 800,000 miles on your airline over the years. I'm generally a very happy customer, but I was just misconnected twice in a day and then had to stay overnight at my own expense, and I was wondering if you could give me a credit to offset the $400 in hotels and cabs that I incurred as a result of this."
And, playing the odds, my guess is that you'll either be given $400 or maybe $300, $320 in terms of the credit. It might be indexed a bit to what the ticket itself costs, but given the truth of the matter and the representation you made about your quality as a customer, institutionally, the lifetime value math takes over.
So: we incurred a cost in dealing with this customer with regards to a ticket where there was only $250 in booked revenue. Fine. But we expect six figures of revenue over the lifetime of this customer. It would be silly of us to put fifty percent of those six figures at risk over quibbling over whether the credit back should be $250 versus $320.
Politeness, magic words, and negotiating the credit
Again, I've said this many times when writing about dangerous professionals, but many people have the opinion that sounding like you're pissed off and need a solution now is the optimal way to deal with customer service staff. It's aesthetically unpleasant. I think it is importantly immoral, given the relative resources that are available to frequent business travelers versus the person that is most likely answering the phone call.
You can have any number of arguments with the multi-billion dollar multinational publicly traded corporation, but please don't make it the problem of someone who earns $12 an hour and doesn't have healthcare benefits. It's also just instrumentally ineffective. I have been a customer service drone before.
It is human nature that you want to push the accommodation button for the person who is polite and nice versus the person who is abusive of you through the entire call. And there is a written-out flowchart in many customer service organizations of when you can disconnect a call, and personal abuse of the representative is often a thing that can cause you to get disconnected, and sometimes a thing that can cause you to get disconnected on future calls as well.
So prefer not to do the immoral, ineffective thing. I will say, even though politeness and some level of rapport building with a representative is generally in your interests, you also need to ask for the thing. Customer service representatives are often not scored on cost control, but the people that write the rules that they are supposed to follow do have some notion of cost control in their head.
And so there are magic words that might get some buttons that are available to them, and you have to say the magic words. So you might be told in training, "Do not offer the customer a credit unless the customer asks for a credit." So please be the person that specifically asks for a credit. You don't necessarily have to offer a number first, and broadly in negotiations, it's against your interests to offer a number first.
I might start out that conversation vaguely by, "I paid for a hotel room, I paid for two cabs, I paid for dinner. Can you make me whole, please?" And let them come up with an estimate of the number that will make you whole. If they offer $500 of credit and you actually paid $420, well, you can swiftly agree to the outcome of the negotiation with the multi-billion dollar enterprise.
If, on the other hand, they offer $420 and you actually paid $500 and you are concerned about the difference, you can always say, "Well, $420 doesn't cover all my costs. Could you go up to $500?"
Another micro-tip. "What's the maximum amount you can authorize?" is a question that probably should be on the list of things that they won't answer, but is usually not written on the list of things that they don't answer, and is often a number that the person has memorized, because they've typed in that number so many times.
So be the polite person and ask, "Well, you understand my options better than I do. What's the maximum amount you can authorize?"
Last resorts: DOT complaints and small claims court
And I will mention for completeness' sake that there are some other options you have available, too. Honestly, if you find yourself reaching for these, I think you have probably, how to say this gently, failed to take advantage of your best resolution with regards to other organizations.
You can file a written complaint with the Department of Transportation or the FAA. Good news with respect to filing a written complaint: the company is obligated to respond to it within a particular timeline. Bad news: they're not particularly obligated to respond to it in a way that makes you happy, and it's very likely that the FAA gets a form letter where they say, "Well, yes, we acknowledge that the customer was inconvenienced, as millions of customers per year are inconvenienced. We offered them X. They did not accept X. We offered them Y. They did not accept Y. This is in excess of all of our statutory obligations. We wish them the best in the future. Have a nice day."
You can also file a claim in small claims court. This doesn't happen very frequently, because it is strictly irrational for most people who fly a lot to take the time out of their day to sue the airline in small claims court. It is also almost strictly irrational for the airline to send a representative to small claims court, because the cost of sending a representative will be more than the typical amount of the controversy. So, mentioning that just for completeness. Again, if you find yourself doing it, either you perhaps run a podcast about airline mechanics and are doing it for the content, or you're making poor life decisions.
And with that, that is some of the mechanics and financialization of air travel disruption. I hope that it'll be useful for you in the future. Well, I hope most sincerely that you never get to use that advice in the future. But who knows? Come a rainy day or an errant backhoe, you might be able to get some value out of it.
And I'll see you next week on Complex Systems.
Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Complex Systems. If you have comments, drop me an email or hit me up @patio11 on Twitter. Ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons, and also because they let me know what you like.
