5 ms·

Assuming they write the contract right, this is pretty standard breach of contract, regardless of the propriety of suing your customers. (Skiplegged.com was thr

Assuming they write the contract right, this is pretty standard breach of contract, regardless of the propriety of suing your customers. (Skiplegged.com was thrown out for lack of jurisdiction, because United wasn't suing the people breaching the contract, only the people enabling it. Here, Lufthansa is suing the right people) Hacker news never seems to like contracts that don't let it do whatever they want, but the person paid and agreed to do a thing, and didn't do it. The fact that y'all think that thing is stupid is irrelevant. Don't make contracts you aren't going to keep.

admax88q 8y ago
What makes you think that by buying a ticket you're now under contract to board the plane?
- DanBC 8y ago
  That the contract you've entered into explicitly says this.
- detaro 8y ago
  You are not under contract to board the plane, but the contract says if you do not board the plane without a good excuse you agree to pay the difference.
- teraflop 8y ago
  When you buy a ticket on Lufthansa you're required to agree to their conditions of carriage, which include this language: > 5.6. A service charge may be payable by any passenger who: > 5.6.1. fails to arrive for departure at the airport or any other point of departure by the time we have specified (or if no time has actually been specified, with insufficient time to permit completion of official formalities and departure procedures) and, as a consequence, does not use the seat for which a reservation has been made
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  The terms state that you have to take the flight or might be required to pay compensation. Mind the situation for the airline: the passenger is checked in, which means they have to call them out and wait for them on boarding and probably double check that they don't have stored luggage, which causes delays, thus cost to the airline.
WillPostForFood 8y ago
Sure, and can I sue Lufthansa when their plane is late or flight is cancelled? The airline has all the power to enforce an extremely one sided contract where they don’t have to perform. Including near monopoly control of many routes.
- detaro 8y ago
  you probably don't even have to sue them, they'll probably pay out the legally & contractually defined compensation if you just ask. If they don't, then yes, you can sue them.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    the legally & contractually defined compensation So nothing. My only option is to choose a different airline, except it is very difficult since I only have one choice unless I fly 1000 miles out of the way the next monopolized hub city where I still have no power. Airlines have almost all the leverage, so they can delay my flight, taking an hour, 10 hours, or a day of my time and there is no compensation. At 40 of the 100 largest U.S. airports, a single airline controls a majority of the market, as measured by the number of seats for sale, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. At 93 of the top 100, one or two airlines control a majority of the seats, an increase from 78 airports, according to AP’s analysis of data from Diio, an airline-schedule tracking service. https://www.denverpost.com/2015/07/17/airline-consolidation-has-created-airport-monopolies-increased-fares/ https://www.denverpost.com/2015/07/17/airline-consolidation-...
izzydata 8y ago
I'm pretty confident that this is not part of the contract. I doubt it would even be legal to enforce such a thing. https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.ht... I couldn't find any example of such a thing in this united airlines contract.
- detaro 8y ago
  You're literally commenting on a case where the court found that this is part of the contract.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Here it is in lufthansa: "> 5.6. A service charge may be payable by any passenger who: > 5.6.1. fails to arrive for departure at the airport or any other point of departure by the time we have specified (or if no time has actually been specified, with insufficient time to permit completion of official formalities and departure procedures) and, as a consequence, does not use the seat for which a reservation has been made" Also, the court literally found it to be in the contract.
  - izzydata 8y ago
    Are they trying to make the case that the service charge for missing a flight is over $2000?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - detaro 8y ago
    From the court document it seems like it is 3.3.3 from https://www.lufthansa.com/be/en/business-terms-and-conditions-1#3 https://www.lufthansa.com/be/en/business-terms-and-condition... If you have chosen a tariff that requires observance of a fixed ticket sequence, please note: if carriage is not used on all individual legs or not used in the sequence specified on the ticket with otherwise unchanged travel data, we will recalculate the airfare according to your altered routing. The airfare will thereby be determined in accordance with the fare you would have had to pay for your actual routing in your price group on the day of your booking. This fare may be higher or lower than the fare you originally paid. If the price group you originally booked was not available for the altered routing on the day of the booking, the cheapest available former price group for your altered routing will be taken as the basis for the recalculation. If on the day of the booking for your altered routing, a higher fare would have been determined, we will subsequently recover the difference taking into account the fare already paid. Please note that we can make carriage dependent on whether you have paid this difference in price.
barrkel 8y ago
I reply here because you also commented here: Normal people who aren't lawyers think of tickets as options not futures; that is, an option to board, not an obligation to board. That's how most people's experience of tickets work, starting out with cinema tickets from a young age, and working up to bus and train tickets later on. It may be that people need to get legal advice every time they buy a ticket, but that's probably not very efficient. The internet is decreasing the opacity of differential pricing, but premium airlines rely on differential pricing for their business model. Thus this case trying to move to harder constraints than mere obfuscation. The case will have PR value too, in changing the public's understanding of the nature of a plane ticket.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  I'm never going to argue making these things contracts is good policy, but it is in fact, the legal reality. You are focusing on one specific act here (the requirement to use the seat) but your other examples are amenable to plenty of other contractual issues. For example your cinema tickets include provisions not to bring in food most of the time, or to record/reproduce the movie. They often include affirmative acts you need to perform as well (if you want to go in that direction). Sometimes minimal, sometimes not. My "don't make contracts you don't want to keep" was based on the fact that literally every reaction prior to my comment was "this is extortion" or "this is unenforceable", and it is definitely neither. People rarely think of legal consequences of anything, and that's actually fine and normal. But if we want that to be the actual legal reality, changes are needed. Those changes do not come by simply saying "This is all bullshit and stupid and unenforceable". They come by explicitly realizing they are in fact enforceable and valid, accepting that, and then making these things not contracts (which would be hard) or otherwise setting up a different regime. (For example, the non-contractual regime that exists to handle baggage liability, or in a bunch of countries, to handle compensation for being kicked off flights)
  - barrkel 8y ago
    To be clear, unlike many people it seems, I don't disagree with the principle of differentiated pricing, because I value the upside - cheap marginal seats. And indeed I'm not disputing that tickets are contracts. I do think that it's reasonable for people to assume, up until now, that tickets are options - that if you no longer agree with the terms before you've exercised it, you can just discard the ticket. That's the only real point I wanted to make, because you made it sound as if it's obvious that tickets may reasonably come with positive obligations to exercise, and I didn't think it was obvious to non-lawyers. I found it interesting that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases talks about retaining the ticket being a condition for being bound by the contract, that using the ticket is equivalent to signing the document, and whether a reasonable person would have known about the terms. Sounds like there could be some edge cases in there, but I don't have the education to be enlightening.

admax88q 8y ago

What makes you think that by buying a ticket you're now under contract to board the plane?

DanBC 8y ago
That the contract you've entered into explicitly says this.
detaro 8y ago
You are not under contract to board the plane, but the contract says if you do not board the plane without a good excuse you agree to pay the difference.
teraflop 8y ago
When you buy a ticket on Lufthansa you're required to agree to their conditions of carriage, which include this language: > 5.6. A service charge may be payable by any passenger who: > 5.6.1. fails to arrive for departure at the airport or any other point of departure by the time we have specified (or if no time has actually been specified, with insufficient time to permit completion of official formalities and departure procedures) and, as a consequence, does not use the seat for which a reservation has been made
johannes1234321 8y ago
The terms state that you have to take the flight or might be required to pay compensation. Mind the situation for the airline: the passenger is checked in, which means they have to call them out and wait for them on boarding and probably double check that they don't have stored luggage, which causes delays, thus cost to the airline.

WillPostForFood 8y ago

Sure, and can I sue Lufthansa when their plane is late or flight is cancelled? The airline has all the power to enforce an extremely one sided contract where they don’t have to perform. Including near monopoly control of many routes.

detaro 8y ago
you probably don't even have to sue them, they'll probably pay out the legally & contractually defined compensation if you just ask. If they don't, then yes, you can sue them.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  the legally & contractually defined compensation So nothing. My only option is to choose a different airline, except it is very difficult since I only have one choice unless I fly 1000 miles out of the way the next monopolized hub city where I still have no power. Airlines have almost all the leverage, so they can delay my flight, taking an hour, 10 hours, or a day of my time and there is no compensation. At 40 of the 100 largest U.S. airports, a single airline controls a majority of the market, as measured by the number of seats for sale, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. At 93 of the top 100, one or two airlines control a majority of the seats, an increase from 78 airports, according to AP’s analysis of data from Diio, an airline-schedule tracking service. https://www.denverpost.com/2015/07/17/airline-consolidation-has-created-airport-monopolies-increased-fares/ https://www.denverpost.com/2015/07/17/airline-consolidation-...

izzydata 8y ago

I'm pretty confident that this is not part of the contract. I doubt it would even be legal to enforce such a thing. https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.ht... I couldn't find any example of such a thing in this united airlines contract.

detaro 8y ago
You're literally commenting on a case where the court found that this is part of the contract.
DannyBee 8y ago
Here it is in lufthansa: "> 5.6. A service charge may be payable by any passenger who: > 5.6.1. fails to arrive for departure at the airport or any other point of departure by the time we have specified (or if no time has actually been specified, with insufficient time to permit completion of official formalities and departure procedures) and, as a consequence, does not use the seat for which a reservation has been made" Also, the court literally found it to be in the contract.
- izzydata 8y ago
  Are they trying to make the case that the service charge for missing a flight is over $2000?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- detaro 8y ago
  From the court document it seems like it is 3.3.3 from https://www.lufthansa.com/be/en/business-terms-and-conditions-1#3 https://www.lufthansa.com/be/en/business-terms-and-condition... If you have chosen a tariff that requires observance of a fixed ticket sequence, please note: if carriage is not used on all individual legs or not used in the sequence specified on the ticket with otherwise unchanged travel data, we will recalculate the airfare according to your altered routing. The airfare will thereby be determined in accordance with the fare you would have had to pay for your actual routing in your price group on the day of your booking. This fare may be higher or lower than the fare you originally paid. If the price group you originally booked was not available for the altered routing on the day of the booking, the cheapest available former price group for your altered routing will be taken as the basis for the recalculation. If on the day of the booking for your altered routing, a higher fare would have been determined, we will subsequently recover the difference taking into account the fare already paid. Please note that we can make carriage dependent on whether you have paid this difference in price.

barrkel 8y ago

I reply here because you also commented here: Normal people who aren't lawyers think of tickets as options not futures; that is, an option to board, not an obligation to board. That's how most people's experience of tickets work, starting out with cinema tickets from a young age, and working up to bus and train tickets later on. It may be that people need to get legal advice every time they buy a ticket, but that's probably not very efficient. The internet is decreasing the opacity of differential pricing, but premium airlines rely on differential pricing for their business model. Thus this case trying to move to harder constraints than mere obfuscation. The case will have PR value too, in changing the public's understanding of the nature of a plane ticket.

DannyBee 8y ago
I'm never going to argue making these things contracts is good policy, but it is in fact, the legal reality. You are focusing on one specific act here (the requirement to use the seat) but your other examples are amenable to plenty of other contractual issues. For example your cinema tickets include provisions not to bring in food most of the time, or to record/reproduce the movie. They often include affirmative acts you need to perform as well (if you want to go in that direction). Sometimes minimal, sometimes not. My "don't make contracts you don't want to keep" was based on the fact that literally every reaction prior to my comment was "this is extortion" or "this is unenforceable", and it is definitely neither. People rarely think of legal consequences of anything, and that's actually fine and normal. But if we want that to be the actual legal reality, changes are needed. Those changes do not come by simply saying "This is all bullshit and stupid and unenforceable". They come by explicitly realizing they are in fact enforceable and valid, accepting that, and then making these things not contracts (which would be hard) or otherwise setting up a different regime. (For example, the non-contractual regime that exists to handle baggage liability, or in a bunch of countries, to handle compensation for being kicked off flights)
- barrkel 8y ago
  To be clear, unlike many people it seems, I don't disagree with the principle of differentiated pricing, because I value the upside - cheap marginal seats. And indeed I'm not disputing that tickets are contracts. I do think that it's reasonable for people to assume, up until now, that tickets are options - that if you no longer agree with the terms before you've exercised it, you can just discard the ticket. That's the only real point I wanted to make, because you made it sound as if it's obvious that tickets may reasonably come with positive obligations to exercise, and I didn't think it was obvious to non-lawyers. I found it interesting that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases talks about retaining the ticket being a condition for being bound by the contract, that using the ticket is equivalent to signing the document, and whether a reasonable person would have known about the terms. Sounds like there could be some edge cases in there, but I don't have the education to be enlightening.