5 ms·

Company sold tickets for the price they wanted. They made the rules. They excluded everything that wasn't allowed in those rules. Time passes and company finds

Company sold tickets for the price they wanted. They made the rules. They excluded everything that wasn't allowed in those rules. Time passes and company finds out the deal wasn't so good anymore (or never was in the first place). So they decide to go after those costumers who are using the tickets in unexpected ways, but that weren't forbidden. When the company has an extra profit for your last-minute ticket, or your cancellation (even when very ahead of time, so that they don't loose some revenue), it's just business, for-profit, hallelujah. When company does something that isn't profitable, they try to stretch rules' limits, the costumer misbehaved, costumers aren't allowed to gain from the company just because the company miscalculated something. Yes, it's good to be a company this way.

AlyssaRowan 10y ago
Agreed. Hiring someone specifically to try to do an aggressive, audit hatchet-job on special, star customers that had spent six figures on golden tickets with them doesn't make this story read very sympathetically for American Airlines to me. Perhaps it's naïveté on my part, expecting a business to have some care for its reputation as well as its bottom line, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to promise an elephant, you'd better at least have a pachyderm on backorder and not try to wriggle out of it the moment it inconveniences you, because that just makes you look callous.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I can't help but feel that "they broke the rules!" is a hollow argument in a case like this. Most obviously, because it's not clear they did - Vroom's contract didn't prohibit ticket sales, but that was still the grounds for revocation. More broadly, though, the issue of selective enforcement is a thorny one. If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you. It's like the issue of selective policing. We live in a world where "don't commit any rules" isn't a viable answer, because there are endless lists of ambiguously defined rules on everyday tasks like accessing a computer. So if someone decides they truly want to pursue you, they can dig up a website where you mis-entered your birthday, declare it fraudulent misrepresentation, and try to put you in prison. If everyone is guilty, the only question is how you decide what to pursue. And in this case, it's painfully clear that American didn't pursue egregious violations or frequent offenders, they went after anyone who had taken advantage of a product they regretted selling.
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    > any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you. That sounds like a totally fantastic agreement, at least from the issuer's point of view and ignoring potential PR problems.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      Yep, and I think that's what's being done. The article makes it pretty clear that the anti-fraud team had total freedom to reinterpret the contract until they got a success. It's hideous, and as someone else pointed out illegal if you can make the claim stick (ambiguity is meant to favor whoever didn't write the contract), but still a great business move.
  - blibble 10y ago
    > If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behaviour. contra proferentem applies in common law, ambiguity benefits the party that did not write the contract otherwise there's no reason to ever write a clear contract
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I think this is why inter-company contracts tend to be clearer and often simpler than company-employee contracts. Your average EULA is impossible to follow or even understand because the company has so much more recourse to the law than the customer - as we see here, with American violating its own contracts and trusting their legal weight to make good. The law very sensibly attempts to punish willful lack of clarity, but (as with patent trolling, and asset forfeiture) it only holds when everyone can fight a legal case.
      - mindslight 10y ago
        A complementary analysis: A company-company contract is actually a much simpler, self-defined, and symmetric relationship. Whereas an employer-employee contract must take into account the huge lump of complexity that is employment law. The company doesn't really like employment law, so they make every attempt to nullify it, paralleling its complexity. EULA drafters are similarly trying to create a whole new body of law, bootstrapping it using copyright while eroding any consumer rights granted by copyright. Companies would prefer a much simpler EULA that said "we can revoke your license at any time for no reason, with no refund". But such a thing would be rejected by courts. So they attempt to construct such a policy by following the contour of the law (ie what courts won't reject) as close as possible. Regarding the original post, I think American was really just doing the standard corporate stonewalling (I'm not endorsing this as being morally right). It seems as if the pass holders would have eventually prevailed in court, but what actually settled the question was American's filing of bankruptcy - which made the whole thing moot.
- mathattack 10y ago
  Anyone who has flown American lately won't be surprised by this type of behavior out of them.
draw_down 10y ago
Super classy how they froze accounts and tried to browbeat people into admitting they paid the pass holders. Jeez.
galdosdi 10y ago
Yeah, this kind of thing pisses me off. They're literally trying to have it both ways. More pragmatically, it's why I'm wary of purchasing any "unlimited" or other deal where a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests the deal is so good the company is losing money on me. It may seem like a great deal for me, but I know that eventually the company may wake up and start looking for every possible excuse to kill the deal, cancel my account, get me in trouble to end the offer, etc, etc. Especially because even if they're in the wrong, it may not be worth it to hire a lawyer to prove it. In the worst case, I may never recoup my investment, in the best case, I may merely break even or make a small profit that doesn't really reflect the hassle and time I put into it. Three random examples: (1) I signed up for Santander's crazy extra20 deal where you get $20 a month for having a checking account. They lied to me (of course I asked this) and told me even if the promotion ended I'd be guaranteed to be grandfathered in forever as long as I kept the account open and met the conditions ($1500 direct deposit monthly and two bill pays per month). A year and a half later they announced they were closing all extra20 accounts and converting them to normal accounts. While I made a couple hundred bucks off it, taking all the time and hassle involved, I'd consider it just slightly better than a wash, which is much worse than the original offer. Not complaining or anything as I knew what I was getting into, just an example of this phenomenon. A lot of incentive offers are kind of similar. Mad respect to those people with nerves of steel who make a living off of churning credit card offers. (2) Rent controlled or stabilized apartments sound awesome but could be kind of scary. The more time passes, the better a deal it becomes for you.... and the more incentive the landlord has to try to stalk and harass you to find an excuse to evict you, and the more you may need to retain an attorney and deal with increasing hassles. Is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not. Rent can be very expensive, but so can legal costs. Do you want your home to be the center of anxiety in your life instead of your refuge from it? (3) Any kind of unlimited storage or bandwidth. You have no idea what the secret magic number is where if you go past it, they'll start looking at you funny trying to find an excuse why you're technically violating the ToS, or degrade your service and find an excuse why it's OK that they degraded it, etc, etc
profeta 10y ago
Sounds exactly like my unlimited data plan with AT&T.
dasil003 10y ago
This is what Joyent, aka TextDrive did to us back in 2004 when they founded the company. Granted it was only $400, but it was for lifetime hosting. For the first few years it was garbage quality, then once they started doing a better job with their VPS/container style hosting they dropped us even though we were the foundation of the company—they literally wouldn't have gotten off the ground without us. To this day, I still consider Jason Hoffman a schmuck, and Joyent to be a disreputable company. Undoubtedly they are much more professional and grown-up now, but then again so am I, and I carry a lot more purchasing power in the companies I represent these days, and I would never choose Joyent as a vendor on any project. Reputation is everything.

AlyssaRowan 10y ago

Agreed. Hiring someone specifically to try to do an aggressive, audit hatchet-job on special, star customers that had spent six figures on golden tickets with them doesn't make this story read very sympathetically for American Airlines to me. Perhaps it's naïveté on my part, expecting a business to have some care for its reputation as well as its bottom line, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to promise an elephant, you'd better at least have a pachyderm on backorder and not try to wriggle out of it the moment it inconveniences you, because that just makes you look callous.

Bartweiss 10y ago
I can't help but feel that "they broke the rules!" is a hollow argument in a case like this. Most obviously, because it's not clear they did - Vroom's contract didn't prohibit ticket sales, but that was still the grounds for revocation. More broadly, though, the issue of selective enforcement is a thorny one. If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you. It's like the issue of selective policing. We live in a world where "don't commit any rules" isn't a viable answer, because there are endless lists of ambiguously defined rules on everyday tasks like accessing a computer. So if someone decides they truly want to pursue you, they can dig up a website where you mis-entered your birthday, declare it fraudulent misrepresentation, and try to put you in prison. If everyone is guilty, the only question is how you decide what to pursue. And in this case, it's painfully clear that American didn't pursue egregious violations or frequent offenders, they went after anyone who had taken advantage of a product they regretted selling.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  > any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behavior. At that point you have a totally broken agreement - you preserve it for anyone whose behavior you like, and revoke it for anyone who crosses you. That sounds like a totally fantastic agreement, at least from the issuer's point of view and ignoring potential PR problems.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Yep, and I think that's what's being done. The article makes it pretty clear that the anti-fraud team had total freedom to reinterpret the contract until they got a success. It's hideous, and as someone else pointed out illegal if you can make the claim stick (ambiguity is meant to favor whoever didn't write the contract), but still a great business move.
- blibble 10y ago
  > If you write a contract sufficiently byzantine and ambiguous, any legitimate use will rub up against the edge of some prohibited behaviour. contra proferentem applies in common law, ambiguity benefits the party that did not write the contract otherwise there's no reason to ever write a clear contract
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think this is why inter-company contracts tend to be clearer and often simpler than company-employee contracts. Your average EULA is impossible to follow or even understand because the company has so much more recourse to the law than the customer - as we see here, with American violating its own contracts and trusting their legal weight to make good. The law very sensibly attempts to punish willful lack of clarity, but (as with patent trolling, and asset forfeiture) it only holds when everyone can fight a legal case.
    - mindslight 10y ago
      A complementary analysis: A company-company contract is actually a much simpler, self-defined, and symmetric relationship. Whereas an employer-employee contract must take into account the huge lump of complexity that is employment law. The company doesn't really like employment law, so they make every attempt to nullify it, paralleling its complexity. EULA drafters are similarly trying to create a whole new body of law, bootstrapping it using copyright while eroding any consumer rights granted by copyright. Companies would prefer a much simpler EULA that said "we can revoke your license at any time for no reason, with no refund". But such a thing would be rejected by courts. So they attempt to construct such a policy by following the contour of the law (ie what courts won't reject) as close as possible. Regarding the original post, I think American was really just doing the standard corporate stonewalling (I'm not endorsing this as being morally right). It seems as if the pass holders would have eventually prevailed in court, but what actually settled the question was American's filing of bankruptcy - which made the whole thing moot.
mathattack 10y ago
Anyone who has flown American lately won't be surprised by this type of behavior out of them.

draw_down 10y ago

Super classy how they froze accounts and tried to browbeat people into admitting they paid the pass holders. Jeez.

galdosdi 10y ago

Yeah, this kind of thing pisses me off. They're literally trying to have it both ways. More pragmatically, it's why I'm wary of purchasing any "unlimited" or other deal where a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests the deal is so good the company is losing money on me. It may seem like a great deal for me, but I know that eventually the company may wake up and start looking for every possible excuse to kill the deal, cancel my account, get me in trouble to end the offer, etc, etc. Especially because even if they're in the wrong, it may not be worth it to hire a lawyer to prove it. In the worst case, I may never recoup my investment, in the best case, I may merely break even or make a small profit that doesn't really reflect the hassle and time I put into it. Three random examples: (1) I signed up for Santander's crazy extra20 deal where you get $20 a month for having a checking account. They lied to me (of course I asked this) and told me even if the promotion ended I'd be guaranteed to be grandfathered in forever as long as I kept the account open and met the conditions ($1500 direct deposit monthly and two bill pays per month). A year and a half later they announced they were closing all extra20 accounts and converting them to normal accounts. While I made a couple hundred bucks off it, taking all the time and hassle involved, I'd consider it just slightly better than a wash, which is much worse than the original offer. Not complaining or anything as I knew what I was getting into, just an example of this phenomenon. A lot of incentive offers are kind of similar. Mad respect to those people with nerves of steel who make a living off of churning credit card offers. (2) Rent controlled or stabilized apartments sound awesome but could be kind of scary. The more time passes, the better a deal it becomes for you.... and the more incentive the landlord has to try to stalk and harass you to find an excuse to evict you, and the more you may need to retain an attorney and deal with increasing hassles. Is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not. Rent can be very expensive, but so can legal costs. Do you want your home to be the center of anxiety in your life instead of your refuge from it? (3) Any kind of unlimited storage or bandwidth. You have no idea what the secret magic number is where if you go past it, they'll start looking at you funny trying to find an excuse why you're technically violating the ToS, or degrade your service and find an excuse why it's OK that they degraded it, etc, etc

profeta 10y ago

Sounds exactly like my unlimited data plan with AT&T.

dasil003 10y ago

This is what Joyent, aka TextDrive did to us back in 2004 when they founded the company. Granted it was only $400, but it was for lifetime hosting. For the first few years it was garbage quality, then once they started doing a better job with their VPS/container style hosting they dropped us even though we were the foundation of the company—they literally wouldn't have gotten off the ground without us. To this day, I still consider Jason Hoffman a schmuck, and Joyent to be a disreputable company. Undoubtedly they are much more professional and grown-up now, but then again so am I, and I carry a lot more purchasing power in the companies I represent these days, and I would never choose Joyent as a vendor on any project. Reputation is everything.