4 ms·

This will be used as a pretense to raise airline fares, and won't impact cancellation rates or average delay times.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
All of those things are motivated by the corporate greed of fat, lazy oligopolies. At least now you can get your money back after your ticket being rendered useless.
maccard 2y ago
Rules like these exist in Europe, and flying in Europe is incredibly cheap. For a random weekend in May, I can fly to 26 different countries for under $50 one way. Airlines here are also significantly less likely to cancel your flights, and in my experience (I've taken somewhere in the region of 200 flights in the last 10 years) there is a bit of wiggle in terms of your actual arrival time, but being more than an hour out is less likely than int eh US.
kristopolous 2y ago
So if a company is going to be insincere and act in bad faith, we shouldn't ever try to curb bad behavior? Such a policy implies the most corrupt and criminal companies should get the least oversight possible. I might be crazy, but I think that's backwards.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bobmcnamara 2y ago
The doors of course, will continue to fall off.
- b112 2y ago
  That's Boeing, not the airline's fault. Don't let Boeing get off, lay the blame at their feet.
paxys 2y ago
If they could have raised fares they would have already. Why do you think this rule will make a difference?
- tyingq 2y ago
  Because each airlines knows their competitors will lose margin if fares don't go up. The new rules are more expensive. So someone will raise the fares, and the competition won't significantly undercut the pricing change.
rainsford 2y ago
That's not necessarily true. Yes, the change to requiring refunds rather than compensation that airlines can weasel out of raises an airline's cost of cancellation, but passing that cost along to their customers makes them less competitive compared to airlines that have better on-time performance. A refund requirement means they can't have their cake (low fares) and eat it too (shitty on-time performance), and there is real financial disincentive to having terrible reliability...or financial incentive to be more reliable.
yuliyp 2y ago
Airlines don't need a pretense to raise fares. They can, and do, adjust rates all the time to charge people as much as they can get away with. Unlike regulated industries such as insurance or utilities, there's nobody they have to convince to let them raise their fares.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  That's not as strong an argument as you think it is. It is common for industries to have settle on points / equilibria based on what other players are doing, and companies typically don't unilaterally rock the boat too much. However external factors act as forcing functions (I call them nucleation sites as a crystallization analogy) around which new equilibria can develop. Regulatory changes are one such example. For example, during COVID many hotels shifted to not doing daily housekeeping. At that point they cited social distancing or workforce shortage reasons. But it's been 2 years since the pandemic was completely over and many hotels now still don't do daily housekeeping. The prices of course haven't reduced. Back in 2014 when California had a drought, my car dealership stopped offering free washes as part of the maintenance package citing bullshit "let's do our part in saving water" reasons. The drought is long over but the free car washes have not come back.
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    They will do daily housekeeping, they just won’t do it automatically. Only if you ask, which I actually prefer.
    - elevatedastalt 2y ago
      I don't know why you are nitpicking about this while ignoring the base point I am making. They used to do daily housekeeping automatically. Now they don't. We went from a default of "Opt-out" to "Opt-in" This change happened across many hotels only during the pandemic despite the fact that, according to the parent poster, they could have done it any time, there was no regulation forcing them to do daily housekeeping.
alkonaut 2y ago
Yes it can raise fares - and that's not some unexpected downside it's just pricing being more transparent. If airlines have a cost to being late/cancelling, then that will balance against the cost of having e.g. N% slack in staff/aircraft/schedules. It most definitely helps reduce cancellation and delays. If you are curious whether this is bullshit, the best experiment would be to time travel back a N years, take two similarly sized continents with lots of flying, and use this type of regulation on one continent and not the other.

All of those things are motivated by the corporate greed of fat, lazy oligopolies. At least now you can get your money back after your ticket being rendered useless.

maccard 2y ago

Rules like these exist in Europe, and flying in Europe is incredibly cheap. For a random weekend in May, I can fly to 26 different countries for under $50 one way. Airlines here are also significantly less likely to cancel your flights, and in my experience (I've taken somewhere in the region of 200 flights in the last 10 years) there is a bit of wiggle in terms of your actual arrival time, but being more than an hour out is less likely than int eh US.

kristopolous 2y ago

So if a company is going to be insincere and act in bad faith, we shouldn't ever try to curb bad behavior? Such a policy implies the most corrupt and criminal companies should get the least oversight possible. I might be crazy, but I think that's backwards.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bobmcnamara 2y ago

The doors of course, will continue to fall off.

b112 2y ago
That's Boeing, not the airline's fault. Don't let Boeing get off, lay the blame at their feet.

paxys 2y ago

If they could have raised fares they would have already. Why do you think this rule will make a difference?

tyingq 2y ago
Because each airlines knows their competitors will lose margin if fares don't go up. The new rules are more expensive. So someone will raise the fares, and the competition won't significantly undercut the pricing change.

rainsford 2y ago

That's not necessarily true. Yes, the change to requiring refunds rather than compensation that airlines can weasel out of raises an airline's cost of cancellation, but passing that cost along to their customers makes them less competitive compared to airlines that have better on-time performance. A refund requirement means they can't have their cake (low fares) and eat it too (shitty on-time performance), and there is real financial disincentive to having terrible reliability...or financial incentive to be more reliable.

yuliyp 2y ago

Airlines don't need a pretense to raise fares. They can, and do, adjust rates all the time to charge people as much as they can get away with. Unlike regulated industries such as insurance or utilities, there's nobody they have to convince to let them raise their fares.

elevatedastalt 2y ago
That's not as strong an argument as you think it is. It is common for industries to have settle on points / equilibria based on what other players are doing, and companies typically don't unilaterally rock the boat too much. However external factors act as forcing functions (I call them nucleation sites as a crystallization analogy) around which new equilibria can develop. Regulatory changes are one such example. For example, during COVID many hotels shifted to not doing daily housekeeping. At that point they cited social distancing or workforce shortage reasons. But it's been 2 years since the pandemic was completely over and many hotels now still don't do daily housekeeping. The prices of course haven't reduced. Back in 2014 when California had a drought, my car dealership stopped offering free washes as part of the maintenance package citing bullshit "let's do our part in saving water" reasons. The drought is long over but the free car washes have not come back.
- WrongAssumption 2y ago
  They will do daily housekeeping, they just won’t do it automatically. Only if you ask, which I actually prefer.
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    I don't know why you are nitpicking about this while ignoring the base point I am making. They used to do daily housekeeping automatically. Now they don't. We went from a default of "Opt-out" to "Opt-in" This change happened across many hotels only during the pandemic despite the fact that, according to the parent poster, they could have done it any time, there was no regulation forcing them to do daily housekeeping.

alkonaut 2y ago

Yes it can raise fares - and that's not some unexpected downside it's just pricing being more transparent. If airlines have a cost to being late/cancelling, then that will balance against the cost of having e.g. N% slack in staff/aircraft/schedules. It most definitely helps reduce cancellation and delays. If you are curious whether this is bullshit, the best experiment would be to time travel back a N years, take two similarly sized continents with lots of flying, and use this type of regulation on one continent and not the other.