18 ms·

The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket

258 points by chha 7y ago

Latteland 7y ago
Did they terminate other people's tickets? The interesting article does mention booking the extra seat and not using it.
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  A number of other people have their tickets terminated for similar reasons. Google the name of the program to find their stories
rabidrat 7y ago
I'm really struggling to get my head around the emotional trauma here. He bought the unlimited ticket, got many multiples of value from it over 30 years, and then they renegged. Had they never offered the ticket, he would have paid much more overall (even though he would almost certainly have also flown less), and would only be exactly where he is now: a poor schlub who has to buy airline tickets to travel. Where is the loss?
- wyclif 7y ago
  People often feel emotional trauma when they're reneged on or sued. It doesn't necessarily have to be done by a person for the victim to feel betrayed. I'm thinking of Uzi Nissan, the owner of Nissan Computers, who is still getting sued by Nissan Motors to turn over nissan.com to them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he feels a certain emotional pain about all that.
- matz1 7y ago
  The pass supposed to last for lifetime, it doesn't matter if he got more value during the time he had it, they took something very very valuable from the man, its easy to see the emotional trauma it caused.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nodesocket 7y ago
  I agree he got his money worth out of American Airlines many many times over, so he should just accept it and pony up for airfare like everybody else now. From the article it seems like he can afford it, previously working at Bears Sterns and being able to afford $250k for the initial unlimited pass. Plus, there was a clause in the contract about fraudulent use, and it certainly seems he was using it fraudulently booking empty first class seats for his luggage and such.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    I don't know, he took a lot of risk that the company would continue to operate over decades. Should early investors of unicorn startups forfeit their equity after getting a fixed multiple of their investment in dividends?
    - Justin_K 7y ago
      Hit the nail on the head. A deal is a deal, regardless of what kind of utilization there was.
      - nodesocket 7y ago
        Except if you break the terms of the contract (fraudulent bookings), which is alluded to in the post.
        ascorbic 7y ago
        Yet the terms never said that what he was doing was considered fraudulent, and they'd known for years he was doing it. It's not like the people who were letting other people use their passes, which is clearly fraudulent. This is ambiguous at best. He was doing something regular first class passengers do all the time, perfectly legitimately: booking extra seats for bags/space/etc, or changing plans at the last minute. Nobody told him this wasn't allowed.
        7y ago
- macintux 7y ago
  He built a strong emotional relationship with the employees and then got cut off, abruptly, at the airport, with them not only unwilling to let him board his flight but unwilling to help him get his luggage back. On top of that, they wouldn’t tell him why (at the time). This was his life for many years. Emotionally it must have been similar to showing up at home one day and discovering your wife had locked you out and filed for divorce with absolutely no warning, and you had no idea what happened.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  > Where is the loss? In the many multiples of millions of dollars the ticket would have saved him over the next 30-40 years? The fact that something the airline sold was a terrible idea doesn’t make it right to suddenly take it away. And to be honest, if literally every action taken by him was actually proxied through AA employees, and nobody said anything. I can’t really see why they would have any ground to stand on in regards to cancelling the ticket.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  It’s a broken promise. How can it be justified that the company takes its promise back?
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  Because of the dissonance vs expectations.
- anticristi 7y ago
  I'm also finding it difficult to empathize with the trauma. Seems like he traveled to Agra, India, so he must have met people that are not only below the flight line, but that will not and cannot leave a 10km circle for the rest of their lifes. Personally, I have bound with people below the flight line and ever since I cherish every flight I take, although it's in economy class and I have to pay for it.
  - djmips 7y ago
    I have empathy for the loss of his son. The pain of ticket loss is harder for me to feel but I get it that people grow accustomed to their place no matter what level and a sudden fall will hurt and bring on depression even if where they land is actually better than 90% of the rest of the population.
purplejacket 7y ago
I can't think of anything as CO2 masturbatory as airline flight.
4ntonius8lock 7y ago
I feel this is the dystopia we are heading to. Not some big brother. Not some soma magic happy pill. But rather a convoluted mess of 'user agreements' - which are designed to basically give all power to the corporate masters that create them. Some of them are even auto tripped by filters and algorithms. If I took the money of a corporation and then reneged on providing what I promised at the time of billing, I'd get sued to death, and even imprisoned. But a paypal account? Uber? Upwork? - Closed, earnings forfeit and anything else they want to do. Sometimes, no human recourse at all, just machines deciding. The worst part is that the majority of the population are inclined to side with the powerful, just look at some of the comments. Some people can't see theft if it is done by the powerful, it becomes 'enforcement of rules', or 'use of tips to pay services', or 'creation of accounts to increase fees', or 'forfeiture of funds'.
tomnipotent 7y ago
This guy was clearly abusing the program. "...of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations. During the same time period, he booked 2,648 flight segments for travel companions, and 2,269 were either canceled or a no-show." Booked 3,009 flight segments in ~42 months. That's 17 flights a week, or 2.4 a day. He was basically using the companion pass to reserve empty seats. Did American screw up by not having better usage guidelines? Yes. Did this guy take clear advantage of this program with bad faith? Yes.
- macintux 7y ago
  Did you catch the fact that it wasn’t his idea to start doing that and that they never told him not to do so?
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    This guy was a stockbroker, not some random barista. He knew what he wanted and how to ask for it. Trying to pretend that travel agents did this all on his behalf and he's just a poor victim is naive.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      If I ask airline personnel to book me an empty seat on my free ticket and they say ‘sure sir, no problem!’ what exactly am I supposed to think went wrong?
      - paulcole 7y ago
        If I have a $500,000 golden ticket that I’ve built my entire identity and life around, I’m not going to trust some random ticket agent who’s just trying to get me off the phone.
        naikrovek 7y ago
        He didn't deal with random ticket agents. Lifetime pass holders call a dedicated number just for them. Those answering knew who he was and he knew them by name.
majormajor 7y ago
There's an interesting angle here of what a "superpower" does to someone's psychology. He internalized the ability to do these extraordinary things - including using the phone staff as a therapist line - as such a part of his identity, that he was devastated by having to live normally again. It's hard for myself to imagine myself getting to the point where I think I'm that special, but I'm not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and/or privilege for decades it couldn't happen to me too. > “So in my incoherent state,” he writes, “I would book a seat for Dan or Laurie just imagining that they might come. I was making reservations and didn’t know whether I was even going. Here is why. I was up and [alone] in my home office and bored. So I would call the 800 number for the AAirpass desk and talk to the agent about the news or the weather or about Paris or little London. Then, after an hour of nothing they had to hang up. So I would make a reservation and ask them to fax it to me. Then the next day I would take the fax and cancel the reservation. I needed someone to talk to at midnight. The 800 number was open.” Even his son says up front that he doesn't see what his dad was doing as such a sensational, extraordinary thing, that that description "doesn’t quite land," which is astonishing too.
- bravo22 7y ago
  > Even his son says The article is by his daughter Caroline.
- 171243 7y ago
  I once had a superpower like this. I bought the Verizon Unlimited 4G internet plan before throttling or data caps were a thing in roughly 2010. I had the Droid Razr Maxx and later Samsung Galaxy S5 with 1 5 dollar app that turned my phone into a hotspot (FoxFi) that the Verizon could neither detect, prevent, or charge extra for. I used 200+ GB's of blazing fast internet over the air for something like $50 a month for about 5 years. It was an insanely good deal. The only rules were I was not allowed to make any modifications to the plan because it was taken off the market and I was considered "grandfathered" in. The "unlimited" plans of today are nothing like that plan was. They have data caps, are throttled, and traffic get reprioritized. It was just as much a part of me as this ticket was for this gentleman (well not quite that much, but you get the point). Eventually Verizon just flat out upped the price to over $100 per month and it became unsustainable. Glorious while it lasted, sorely missed.
JackFr 7y ago
> of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations. So for a period of three and a half years, he booked about 2.3 flights a day, every day, and then only flew on about 1 in 6 of them. And he did a similar thing with his companion ticket. There is a cost to this — 1st class seats the airline couldn’t sell or give to more valuable customers. The greater cost to the airline it seems was not flying this guy around, but his cancellations - which cost him nothing. And I think the judge, and many reasonable people would say that while the rules are unclear, he was clearly acting in bad faith.
- supercanuck 7y ago
  As a frequent flyer, 2005-2008 was also a period of time when there were empty seats on planes and the airline industry was still recovering from 9/11. You could fly and half the plane might be empty. Cancellations fees weren't nearly as bad either. Let's not jump to conclusions that he was acting in bad faith.
  - koolba 7y ago
    First class tickets usually do not have cancellation fees. They’re fully refundable.
    - eli 7y ago
      But there’s no lost revenue - no actual cost - for cancelling a ticket nobody else was ever going to buy anyway.
      - chrischen 7y ago
        Nobody bought it because it was unavailable.
        msinclair 7y ago
        And if he had flown, it still would have been unavailable. Along with the other thousands of booked flights.
markvdb 7y ago
Reminds me of Max-Hervé George and his fund investment contract: http://archive.is/jkb0x http://archive.is/jkb0x
danielfoster 7y ago
It seems like AA had reasonable issues with how the pass was used, but it was pretty clear they were simply looking for justifications to cancel it. A warning and clarification of terms would have been sufficient. But I'm sure cancelling these passes reduced expenses-- at least on paper.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
  They’re the same issue as pensions - liabilities that can’t be funded because there is no theoretical upper bound (even if there is a practical one). An absolute nightmare for bean counters.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    Well, there's got to be a dollar amount that it's worth to them to have fully funded liabilities, and if it's as high as you seem to be saying then I'm pretty sure they could have gone to an investment bank or insurer or something and gotten them to write a custom product to cap their liability. I thought a good part of investment banking business consisted of corporate finance deals to shift miscellaneous risks like this off their clients' books. My guess is that it's just the sheer cost that American balked at, not the uncertainty in exactly how much he would cost them.
Ayesh 7y ago
One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year. With so many pointless flights, I can't even wrap my head around his environment foot print.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year. Do you have a link on this? I've tried to look up numbers on this multiple times in the past, but reliable numbers have been hard to come by, especially for recent years. The ones I recall said that trans-continental flights in the US use something like 1/5 of a year's worth of car emissions, not a whole year's worth.
  - ISL 7y ago
    Using these numbers: https://theicct.org/publications/transatlantic-airline-fuel-efficiency-ranking-2017 https://theicct.org/publications/transatlantic-airline-fuel-... , which shows ~34 pax-km/l efficiency and the fact that a Prius does ~40 km/l, a plane flight, per-passenger, does about as well as a single-occupancy vehicle for each passenger travelling the same distance. The environmental trouble really comes from the fact that it is easy to fly long distances. It is ~7400 miles from SFO to Sydney, so a round-trip really does burn about as much gas as a year's worth of single-occupancy automobile driving. The article states that the person in question flew at least 30,000,000 miles. That is, in carbon terms, assuming a 2017 aircraft, equivalent to driving around the world at least ~1200 times in a single-occupancy vehicle.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      I think the 40 km/l is unrealistic -- that's 95 mpg. Your average car is apparently(?) under a quarter of that, 22 mpg [3]. Although I feel like this is probably a low-ball (possibly old) figure? My guess would've been like 30 mpg, but I don't know how much of the population has a new car. The source I had was [1] which said a plane emits ~0.9 tons of CO2/person/round-trip, whereas the average car emits ~4.6 tons/year [2]. At 1.7 persons/car [3] that's 2.7 tons CO2/person/year. Now interestingly, I can't seem to see a source for the 0.9-ton figure; I do see some other sites [4] that claim a one-way flight of that distance emits 2.8 tons, which is a 6x difference... I'm not sure which one is accurate. But there's another site [5] quoting a similar figure to the 0.9 tons. So funny enough I'm kinda back where I'm started... not sure what the right figure is to even 5x... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollution-global-warming.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio... [2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [3] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf [4] https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/carbon-offsets https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/carbon-offsets [5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/if-you-travel-and-care-about-environment-you-should-buy-carbon-offsets-180952222/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/if-you-travel-and-care...
benenglish 7y ago
Entitled white kid moaning that multi-millionaire daddy lost his golden ticket
gesman 7y ago
This is the story of typically bad business decision of offering anything "unlimited". I just cancelled my account with the vendor of "unlimited" cloud storage (who would throttle uploads to their promised unlimited cloud storage to curb the effects of bad business decision) to the benefit of clear, high performance vendor. Whenver you see "unlimited" or "unlimted forever" - question this. If nothing else - ride the wave but don't expect it to be "unlimited" or "forever".
- peterkelly 7y ago
  I once saw an ISP in Thailand advertising "unlimited speed": https://imgur.com/a/Gcl6JTF https://imgur.com/a/Gcl6JTF
  - npiht 7y ago
    It could mean that the speed is uncapped to what the physical medium and the current network congestion allows.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- philjohn 7y ago
  Backblaze seems to have made a business model out of unlimited cloud backup for a single computer. They do it by building their own super high capacity, super low cost storage pods, deduplicating data and relying on the fact that most people don't have multiple TB of data on their personal computers.
  - Slartie 7y ago
    And by refusing to offer a Linux version of their backup tool, which would be a totally logical thing to do, given their apparent focus on tech-savvy customers (just look at how and where they advertise). Tech-savvy people use Linux on their machines far more often than the average customer, So supporting it would be a no-brainer. But people also tend to use Linux on machines with lots of disk space, like home servers. Wouldn't it be nice if those could backup their 30TB locally attached storage with the unlimited plan? Nope, not for Backblaze, which is why they shy away from Linux and try to get Linux users to buy their pay-per-Gigabyte plan (for which they miraculously are able to provide Linux support...).
manigandham 7y ago
Heard about the AAirpass from Mark Cuban who calls it one of the best things he's ever bought. If I had 250k to spend on one, I'd definitely do it too. There's something magical about being able to point to a place on the globe and get there in hours and apparently there's still a few valid ones out there.
- Tepix 7y ago
  A few years ago I thought the same. These days Flugscham/Flygskam should stop you from flying everywhere, all the time.
rkagerer 7y ago
The decent thing to do would have been to give him a warning first, before they suddenly revoked the pass.
j7ake 7y ago
This was a captivating article of a time when a company severely mispriced a product. I wonder what are today’s products that have this sort of potential mispricings?
- uptown 7y ago
  Anything with a “lifetime” option is worth evaluating. I’ve come out way ahead on plans that are pricey up-front but easily pay off longer-term if you plan to remain a user of that service or product.
  - j7ake 7y ago
    Yes. The only risk is the potential bankruptcy or revoking of life time privileges. Otherwise it’s often a good deal.
zwaps 7y ago
On the one hand, AA could have handled this much better. The author repeats almost every paragraph that even though the bookings were "fraudulent", AA never had an issue with them until they wanted to cancel the pass. On the other hand, the whole article reeks of privilege, both by the rich-kid author and the guy. I understand that it is unfair to reneg. But the pass, and the whole system these people live in, is based on unsustainable and negative externalities on people who certainly can not fly to Sweden or Paris just to pick up flowers! Indeed, the "identity" of using an airplane like a bus is not a good one. Airplane travel is one contributor to climate change, something that will (of course) hit poor countries really hard. Again, I understand the feeling when something like that is taken away. But beyond a miniscule, yet direct, contribution to climate change, someone who just flies across the ocean because he (or she) can to do something that could have been done at home as well, and call it an "identity" - ignoring that it has a real and terrible effect (even if the contribution is small) on the weakest among us - I dunno. In that light, I just can't help to feel disgusted by this guy. Now, I am sure I am not the one who should throw the first stone etc... but she did write that article for me to read. So there it is.
- myvoiceismypass 7y ago
  The “I won’t be able to pick up flowers in Paris on my 70th birthday!” complaint was my favorite gem here. I was 100% unsympathetic to this family by the end of this read.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Amygaz 7y ago
    It read like anything written by a narcissist. The first quarter is interesting but rather obvious. The last three-quarter is so full of it. These people have a very “specific” relationship with society...
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    The guy paid $400k to American Airlines in 1987 money. American Airlines was begging people to buy these things. If I buy something from you, I expect to be able to use it. If I pay you a lot of money, I expect a lot of service.
jmkni 7y ago
Interesting read, one note: > Dad’s luggage went to London. They wouldn’t help him get it back. He called someone in the baggage department at Heathrow, who assisted. Aamil never made it to Sarajevo. In fact, that was one of the last times they ever spoke. Ultimately, Aamil disappeared from our lives. After the Lockerbie bombing, I thought that aviation rules where changed to prevent a flight taking off if the owner of checked in luggage isn't on board the plane, so this was a bit surprising. I wonder if AA broke a few rules here in their haste to terminate the pass?
- ainiriand 7y ago
  I thought that it was the other way around, that if you checked in the bags and never made it to the flight, then the flight has to be stopped.
  - jmkni 7y ago
    Isn't that what I said? :) He checked in his bags, but didn't get on the plane, which then took off with his bags on board.
- dmurray 7y ago
  People's luggage goes to the wrong city all the time, thanks to mistakes by airlines or baggage handlers. The policy is that the passenger can't book his luggage on one flight and then opt not to take it, not that they will never take unaccompanied luggage.
  - jmkni 7y ago
    Cool good to know, I just remember hearing something like that on an episode of Air Crash Investigation so it jumped out at me.
hmmhm 7y ago
Yet another worthless article lamenting the fact that an immensely privileged person had a minor inconvenience to their lifestyle. It's not exactly something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", as according to the HN guidelines - obsessing over the idle rich is not an intellectual pursuit.
- benenglish 7y ago
  ^^ This 100%
dkersten 7y ago
> taking away something integral to who he was. Uhh... so flying at a very discounted rate was integral to who he was? His identity? That seems a bit much. I'm finding it hard to sympathise with this guy, although AA sold a "lifetime" ticket, so that was their mistake and they should honour it. If it had turned out to have made them money instead, they'd happily continue. They made a miscalculation, that's on them.
ganesh7 7y ago
Every regular customer should be thankful this was put to an end. Keep in mind such every regular customer will have to pay for such extravaganza that will have to be reflected in the ticket prices after all.
DebtDeflation 7y ago
I have a hard time feeling sympathetic to either party here. Clearly the man was violating the terms of the contract with speculative bookings and booking seats for his luggage under fake names. OTOH, the airline clearly intended for these to be like lifetime gym memberships where people buy them and then hardly use them (an unrealistic expectation for something that cost $250K in 1980's dollars) and was looking for any way possible to cancel their obligations once this didn't play out as hoped.
dang 7y ago
Previous AAirpass thread (2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802751. I think there were others?

258 points by chha 7y ago

Did they terminate other people's tickets? The interesting article does mention booking the extra seat and not using it.

dmitrygr 7y ago
A number of other people have their tickets terminated for similar reasons. Google the name of the program to find their stories

rabidrat 7y ago

I'm really struggling to get my head around the emotional trauma here. He bought the unlimited ticket, got many multiples of value from it over 30 years, and then they renegged. Had they never offered the ticket, he would have paid much more overall (even though he would almost certainly have also flown less), and would only be exactly where he is now: a poor schlub who has to buy airline tickets to travel. Where is the loss?

wyclif 7y ago
People often feel emotional trauma when they're reneged on or sued. It doesn't necessarily have to be done by a person for the victim to feel betrayed. I'm thinking of Uzi Nissan, the owner of Nissan Computers, who is still getting sued by Nissan Motors to turn over nissan.com to them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he feels a certain emotional pain about all that.
matz1 7y ago
The pass supposed to last for lifetime, it doesn't matter if he got more value during the time he had it, they took something very very valuable from the man, its easy to see the emotional trauma it caused.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nodesocket 7y ago
I agree he got his money worth out of American Airlines many many times over, so he should just accept it and pony up for airfare like everybody else now. From the article it seems like he can afford it, previously working at Bears Sterns and being able to afford $250k for the initial unlimited pass. Plus, there was a clause in the contract about fraudulent use, and it certainly seems he was using it fraudulently booking empty first class seats for his luggage and such.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  I don't know, he took a lot of risk that the company would continue to operate over decades. Should early investors of unicorn startups forfeit their equity after getting a fixed multiple of their investment in dividends?
  - Justin_K 7y ago
    Hit the nail on the head. A deal is a deal, regardless of what kind of utilization there was.
    - nodesocket 7y ago
      Except if you break the terms of the contract (fraudulent bookings), which is alluded to in the post.
      - ascorbic 7y ago
        Yet the terms never said that what he was doing was considered fraudulent, and they'd known for years he was doing it. It's not like the people who were letting other people use their passes, which is clearly fraudulent. This is ambiguous at best. He was doing something regular first class passengers do all the time, perfectly legitimately: booking extra seats for bags/space/etc, or changing plans at the last minute. Nobody told him this wasn't allowed.
        7y ago
macintux 7y ago
He built a strong emotional relationship with the employees and then got cut off, abruptly, at the airport, with them not only unwilling to let him board his flight but unwilling to help him get his luggage back. On top of that, they wouldn’t tell him why (at the time). This was his life for many years. Emotionally it must have been similar to showing up at home one day and discovering your wife had locked you out and filed for divorce with absolutely no warning, and you had no idea what happened.
Aeolun 7y ago
> Where is the loss? In the many multiples of millions of dollars the ticket would have saved him over the next 30-40 years? The fact that something the airline sold was a terrible idea doesn’t make it right to suddenly take it away. And to be honest, if literally every action taken by him was actually proxied through AA employees, and nobody said anything. I can’t really see why they would have any ground to stand on in regards to cancelling the ticket.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
It’s a broken promise. How can it be justified that the company takes its promise back?
hkmurakami 7y ago
Because of the dissonance vs expectations.
anticristi 7y ago
I'm also finding it difficult to empathize with the trauma. Seems like he traveled to Agra, India, so he must have met people that are not only below the flight line, but that will not and cannot leave a 10km circle for the rest of their lifes. Personally, I have bound with people below the flight line and ever since I cherish every flight I take, although it's in economy class and I have to pay for it.
- djmips 7y ago
  I have empathy for the loss of his son. The pain of ticket loss is harder for me to feel but I get it that people grow accustomed to their place no matter what level and a sudden fall will hurt and bring on depression even if where they land is actually better than 90% of the rest of the population.

purplejacket 7y ago

I can't think of anything as CO2 masturbatory as airline flight.

4ntonius8lock 7y ago

I feel this is the dystopia we are heading to. Not some big brother. Not some soma magic happy pill. But rather a convoluted mess of 'user agreements' - which are designed to basically give all power to the corporate masters that create them. Some of them are even auto tripped by filters and algorithms. If I took the money of a corporation and then reneged on providing what I promised at the time of billing, I'd get sued to death, and even imprisoned. But a paypal account? Uber? Upwork? - Closed, earnings forfeit and anything else they want to do. Sometimes, no human recourse at all, just machines deciding. The worst part is that the majority of the population are inclined to side with the powerful, just look at some of the comments. Some people can't see theft if it is done by the powerful, it becomes 'enforcement of rules', or 'use of tips to pay services', or 'creation of accounts to increase fees', or 'forfeiture of funds'.

tomnipotent 7y ago

This guy was clearly abusing the program. "...of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations. During the same time period, he booked 2,648 flight segments for travel companions, and 2,269 were either canceled or a no-show." Booked 3,009 flight segments in ~42 months. That's 17 flights a week, or 2.4 a day. He was basically using the companion pass to reserve empty seats. Did American screw up by not having better usage guidelines? Yes. Did this guy take clear advantage of this program with bad faith? Yes.

macintux 7y ago
Did you catch the fact that it wasn’t his idea to start doing that and that they never told him not to do so?
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  This guy was a stockbroker, not some random barista. He knew what he wanted and how to ask for it. Trying to pretend that travel agents did this all on his behalf and he's just a poor victim is naive.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    If I ask airline personnel to book me an empty seat on my free ticket and they say ‘sure sir, no problem!’ what exactly am I supposed to think went wrong?
    - paulcole 7y ago
      If I have a $500,000 golden ticket that I’ve built my entire identity and life around, I’m not going to trust some random ticket agent who’s just trying to get me off the phone.
      - naikrovek 7y ago
        He didn't deal with random ticket agents. Lifetime pass holders call a dedicated number just for them. Those answering knew who he was and he knew them by name.

majormajor 7y ago

There's an interesting angle here of what a "superpower" does to someone's psychology. He internalized the ability to do these extraordinary things - including using the phone staff as a therapist line - as such a part of his identity, that he was devastated by having to live normally again. It's hard for myself to imagine myself getting to the point where I think I'm that special, but I'm not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and/or privilege for decades it couldn't happen to me too. > “So in my incoherent state,” he writes, “I would book a seat for Dan or Laurie just imagining that they might come. I was making reservations and didn’t know whether I was even going. Here is why. I was up and [alone] in my home office and bored. So I would call the 800 number for the AAirpass desk and talk to the agent about the news or the weather or about Paris or little London. Then, after an hour of nothing they had to hang up. So I would make a reservation and ask them to fax it to me. Then the next day I would take the fax and cancel the reservation. I needed someone to talk to at midnight. The 800 number was open.” Even his son says up front that he doesn't see what his dad was doing as such a sensational, extraordinary thing, that that description "doesn’t quite land," which is astonishing too.

bravo22 7y ago
> Even his son says The article is by his daughter Caroline.
171243 7y ago
I once had a superpower like this. I bought the Verizon Unlimited 4G internet plan before throttling or data caps were a thing in roughly 2010. I had the Droid Razr Maxx and later Samsung Galaxy S5 with 1 5 dollar app that turned my phone into a hotspot (FoxFi) that the Verizon could neither detect, prevent, or charge extra for. I used 200+ GB's of blazing fast internet over the air for something like $50 a month for about 5 years. It was an insanely good deal. The only rules were I was not allowed to make any modifications to the plan because it was taken off the market and I was considered "grandfathered" in. The "unlimited" plans of today are nothing like that plan was. They have data caps, are throttled, and traffic get reprioritized. It was just as much a part of me as this ticket was for this gentleman (well not quite that much, but you get the point). Eventually Verizon just flat out upped the price to over $100 per month and it became unsustainable. Glorious while it lasted, sorely missed.

JackFr 7y ago

> of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was considered a “no-show” for 84 percent of those reservations. So for a period of three and a half years, he booked about 2.3 flights a day, every day, and then only flew on about 1 in 6 of them. And he did a similar thing with his companion ticket. There is a cost to this — 1st class seats the airline couldn’t sell or give to more valuable customers. The greater cost to the airline it seems was not flying this guy around, but his cancellations - which cost him nothing. And I think the judge, and many reasonable people would say that while the rules are unclear, he was clearly acting in bad faith.

supercanuck 7y ago
As a frequent flyer, 2005-2008 was also a period of time when there were empty seats on planes and the airline industry was still recovering from 9/11. You could fly and half the plane might be empty. Cancellations fees weren't nearly as bad either. Let's not jump to conclusions that he was acting in bad faith.
- koolba 7y ago
  First class tickets usually do not have cancellation fees. They’re fully refundable.
  - eli 7y ago
    But there’s no lost revenue - no actual cost - for cancelling a ticket nobody else was ever going to buy anyway.
    - chrischen 7y ago
      Nobody bought it because it was unavailable.
      - msinclair 7y ago
        And if he had flown, it still would have been unavailable. Along with the other thousands of booked flights.

markvdb 7y ago

Reminds me of Max-Hervé George and his fund investment contract: http://archive.is/jkb0x http://archive.is/jkb0x

danielfoster 7y ago

It seems like AA had reasonable issues with how the pass was used, but it was pretty clear they were simply looking for justifications to cancel it. A warning and clarification of terms would have been sufficient. But I'm sure cancelling these passes reduced expenses-- at least on paper.

SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
They’re the same issue as pensions - liabilities that can’t be funded because there is no theoretical upper bound (even if there is a practical one). An absolute nightmare for bean counters.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  Well, there's got to be a dollar amount that it's worth to them to have fully funded liabilities, and if it's as high as you seem to be saying then I'm pretty sure they could have gone to an investment bank or insurer or something and gotten them to write a custom product to cap their liability. I thought a good part of investment banking business consisted of corporate finance deals to shift miscellaneous risks like this off their clients' books. My guess is that it's just the sheer cost that American balked at, not the uncertainty in exactly how much he would cost them.

Ayesh 7y ago

One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year. With so many pointless flights, I can't even wrap my head around his environment foot print.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> One trans Atlantic flight can burn as much as fuel as typical person would burn on a car Inna year. Do you have a link on this? I've tried to look up numbers on this multiple times in the past, but reliable numbers have been hard to come by, especially for recent years. The ones I recall said that trans-continental flights in the US use something like 1/5 of a year's worth of car emissions, not a whole year's worth.
- ISL 7y ago
  Using these numbers: https://theicct.org/publications/transatlantic-airline-fuel-efficiency-ranking-2017 https://theicct.org/publications/transatlantic-airline-fuel-... , which shows ~34 pax-km/l efficiency and the fact that a Prius does ~40 km/l, a plane flight, per-passenger, does about as well as a single-occupancy vehicle for each passenger travelling the same distance. The environmental trouble really comes from the fact that it is easy to fly long distances. It is ~7400 miles from SFO to Sydney, so a round-trip really does burn about as much gas as a year's worth of single-occupancy automobile driving. The article states that the person in question flew at least 30,000,000 miles. That is, in carbon terms, assuming a 2017 aircraft, equivalent to driving around the world at least ~1200 times in a single-occupancy vehicle.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    I think the 40 km/l is unrealistic -- that's 95 mpg. Your average car is apparently(?) under a quarter of that, 22 mpg [3]. Although I feel like this is probably a low-ball (possibly old) figure? My guess would've been like 30 mpg, but I don't know how much of the population has a new car. The source I had was [1] which said a plane emits ~0.9 tons of CO2/person/round-trip, whereas the average car emits ~4.6 tons/year [2]. At 1.7 persons/car [3] that's 2.7 tons CO2/person/year. Now interestingly, I can't seem to see a source for the 0.9-ton figure; I do see some other sites [4] that claim a one-way flight of that distance emits 2.8 tons, which is a 6x difference... I'm not sure which one is accurate. But there's another site [5] quoting a similar figure to the 0.9 tons. So funny enough I'm kinda back where I'm started... not sure what the right figure is to even 5x... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollution-global-warming.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio... [2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [3] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf [4] https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/carbon-offsets https://content.sierraclub.org/outings/carbon-offsets [5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/if-you-travel-and-care-about-environment-you-should-buy-carbon-offsets-180952222/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/if-you-travel-and-care...

benenglish 7y ago

Entitled white kid moaning that multi-millionaire daddy lost his golden ticket

gesman 7y ago

This is the story of typically bad business decision of offering anything "unlimited". I just cancelled my account with the vendor of "unlimited" cloud storage (who would throttle uploads to their promised unlimited cloud storage to curb the effects of bad business decision) to the benefit of clear, high performance vendor. Whenver you see "unlimited" or "unlimted forever" - question this. If nothing else - ride the wave but don't expect it to be "unlimited" or "forever".

peterkelly 7y ago
I once saw an ISP in Thailand advertising "unlimited speed": https://imgur.com/a/Gcl6JTF https://imgur.com/a/Gcl6JTF
- npiht 7y ago
  It could mean that the speed is uncapped to what the physical medium and the current network congestion allows.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
philjohn 7y ago
Backblaze seems to have made a business model out of unlimited cloud backup for a single computer. They do it by building their own super high capacity, super low cost storage pods, deduplicating data and relying on the fact that most people don't have multiple TB of data on their personal computers.
- Slartie 7y ago
  And by refusing to offer a Linux version of their backup tool, which would be a totally logical thing to do, given their apparent focus on tech-savvy customers (just look at how and where they advertise). Tech-savvy people use Linux on their machines far more often than the average customer, So supporting it would be a no-brainer. But people also tend to use Linux on machines with lots of disk space, like home servers. Wouldn't it be nice if those could backup their 30TB locally attached storage with the unlimited plan? Nope, not for Backblaze, which is why they shy away from Linux and try to get Linux users to buy their pay-per-Gigabyte plan (for which they miraculously are able to provide Linux support...).

manigandham 7y ago

Heard about the AAirpass from Mark Cuban who calls it one of the best things he's ever bought. If I had 250k to spend on one, I'd definitely do it too. There's something magical about being able to point to a place on the globe and get there in hours and apparently there's still a few valid ones out there.

Tepix 7y ago
A few years ago I thought the same. These days Flugscham/Flygskam should stop you from flying everywhere, all the time.

rkagerer 7y ago

The decent thing to do would have been to give him a warning first, before they suddenly revoked the pass.

j7ake 7y ago

This was a captivating article of a time when a company severely mispriced a product. I wonder what are today’s products that have this sort of potential mispricings?

uptown 7y ago
Anything with a “lifetime” option is worth evaluating. I’ve come out way ahead on plans that are pricey up-front but easily pay off longer-term if you plan to remain a user of that service or product.
- j7ake 7y ago
  Yes. The only risk is the potential bankruptcy or revoking of life time privileges. Otherwise it’s often a good deal.

zwaps 7y ago

On the one hand, AA could have handled this much better. The author repeats almost every paragraph that even though the bookings were "fraudulent", AA never had an issue with them until they wanted to cancel the pass. On the other hand, the whole article reeks of privilege, both by the rich-kid author and the guy. I understand that it is unfair to reneg. But the pass, and the whole system these people live in, is based on unsustainable and negative externalities on people who certainly can not fly to Sweden or Paris just to pick up flowers! Indeed, the "identity" of using an airplane like a bus is not a good one. Airplane travel is one contributor to climate change, something that will (of course) hit poor countries really hard. Again, I understand the feeling when something like that is taken away. But beyond a miniscule, yet direct, contribution to climate change, someone who just flies across the ocean because he (or she) can to do something that could have been done at home as well, and call it an "identity" - ignoring that it has a real and terrible effect (even if the contribution is small) on the weakest among us - I dunno. In that light, I just can't help to feel disgusted by this guy. Now, I am sure I am not the one who should throw the first stone etc... but she did write that article for me to read. So there it is.

myvoiceismypass 7y ago
The “I won’t be able to pick up flowers in Paris on my 70th birthday!” complaint was my favorite gem here. I was 100% unsympathetic to this family by the end of this read.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Amygaz 7y ago
  It read like anything written by a narcissist. The first quarter is interesting but rather obvious. The last three-quarter is so full of it. These people have a very “specific” relationship with society...
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  The guy paid $400k to American Airlines in 1987 money. American Airlines was begging people to buy these things. If I buy something from you, I expect to be able to use it. If I pay you a lot of money, I expect a lot of service.

jmkni 7y ago

Interesting read, one note: > Dad’s luggage went to London. They wouldn’t help him get it back. He called someone in the baggage department at Heathrow, who assisted. Aamil never made it to Sarajevo. In fact, that was one of the last times they ever spoke. Ultimately, Aamil disappeared from our lives. After the Lockerbie bombing, I thought that aviation rules where changed to prevent a flight taking off if the owner of checked in luggage isn't on board the plane, so this was a bit surprising. I wonder if AA broke a few rules here in their haste to terminate the pass?

ainiriand 7y ago
I thought that it was the other way around, that if you checked in the bags and never made it to the flight, then the flight has to be stopped.
- jmkni 7y ago
  Isn't that what I said? :) He checked in his bags, but didn't get on the plane, which then took off with his bags on board.
dmurray 7y ago
People's luggage goes to the wrong city all the time, thanks to mistakes by airlines or baggage handlers. The policy is that the passenger can't book his luggage on one flight and then opt not to take it, not that they will never take unaccompanied luggage.
- jmkni 7y ago
  Cool good to know, I just remember hearing something like that on an episode of Air Crash Investigation so it jumped out at me.

hmmhm 7y ago

Yet another worthless article lamenting the fact that an immensely privileged person had a minor inconvenience to their lifestyle. It's not exactly something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", as according to the HN guidelines - obsessing over the idle rich is not an intellectual pursuit.

benenglish 7y ago
^^ This 100%

dkersten 7y ago

> taking away something integral to who he was. Uhh... so flying at a very discounted rate was integral to who he was? His identity? That seems a bit much. I'm finding it hard to sympathise with this guy, although AA sold a "lifetime" ticket, so that was their mistake and they should honour it. If it had turned out to have made them money instead, they'd happily continue. They made a miscalculation, that's on them.

ganesh7 7y ago

Every regular customer should be thankful this was put to an end. Keep in mind such every regular customer will have to pay for such extravaganza that will have to be reflected in the ticket prices after all.

DebtDeflation 7y ago

I have a hard time feeling sympathetic to either party here. Clearly the man was violating the terms of the contract with speculative bookings and booking seats for his luggage under fake names. OTOH, the airline clearly intended for these to be like lifetime gym memberships where people buy them and then hardly use them (an unrealistic expectation for something that cost $250K in 1980's dollars) and was looking for any way possible to cancel their obligations once this didn't play out as hoped.

dang 7y ago

Previous AAirpass thread (2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802751. I think there were others?