AirTran ACEholes
I thought American Airlines sucked, but right now Patterico and his entire family are stranded for three days because Air Tran couldn’t get their act together for three hours. Apparently, Air Tran’s business model is so crappy they actually planned for this sort of thing. From their “contract of carriage,” which you’ve almost certainly never seen but have presumably “signed” every time you boarded one of their planes, take a gander at Sections A, C and E, Right of the Carrier and Limits on Liability for Delay or Failure to Perform Service, Including Schedule Changes, Substitution of Alternate Aircraft and Rerouting:
A. AirTran will endeavor to transport the passenger and baggage with reasonable dispatch, but times shown in timetables or elsewhere are not guaranteed and form no part of this contract.
C. Schedules are subject to change without notice. AirTran is not responsible or liable for failure to make connections or for failure to operate any flight according to schedule, or for a change to the schedule of any flight. Under no circumstances shall AirTran be liable for any special, incidental or consequential damages arising from the foregoing (including the carriage of baggage) whether or not AirTran had knowledge that such damages might be incurred.
E. AirTran wil not provide or reimburse passengers for expenses incurred due to delays or cancellations of flights.
In other words, welcome to the Jack-(o)F(f)M of air travel: we’ll fly you where we want, when we want, and if our three hour screwup screws you up for as many days, so be it. Of course, delays caused by the customer are something different. If you cause the delay in your travel, you will pay AirTran, the only question is how much. Per Section K(1)(a), Voluntary Refunds:
If the passenger decides not to use the ticket, and the ticket is not subject to non-refundable restrictions, AirTran will issue a credit as follows:
If the ticket is totally or partially unused, the total fare paid for each unused segment minus a cancellation charge will be applied toward future travel if the reservation is canceled at least one (1) hour prior to departure.
The rest of this self-serving “contract” consists of a litany of “we’re not liable” crap, filling a total of 17 pages. What a horrendous waste of ones and zeroes. All they really needed was four words: “Screw you, pay us.”
UPDATE: Actually, American’s “contract” isn’t much better.
UPDATE x2: What, you say? You’ve never heard of AirTran? Sure you have - when they were called ValuJet. More here. Thanks to Aphrael for pointing out this connection, which I had completely missed.
January 3rd, 2006 at 9:50 am
I believe you’ll find that most airlines have provisions somewhat like that.
At least, all of them that i’ve read - i’ve been bored in airports - have said similar things.
January 3rd, 2006 at 5:58 pm
I believe this was based on Western Union’s disclaimer on the back of its telegrams.It only contracted to attempt to deliver a message.No stipulation as to time or even if via a telegraph wire.Source:Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
January 3rd, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Of course, in your “survival-of-the-fittest” brand of capitalism, the ability of a corporation to screw consumers is a good thing, right?
AirTran has this horribly one-sided contract because it’s passing the entire risk of flying on to consumers. Thus making it cheaper to fly Air-Tran for many passengers, by ensuring that random “losers” bear the full brunt of various short-cuts taken by the company.
After all, this is what corporations are all about — passing the risk of inefficiency and incompetence from to the consumer in an attractively-priced package those who behave responsibly can’t match.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Actually, in my brand of capitalism, the ability of a corporation to go out of business if it pisses off too many customers is a good thing. As bad as AirTran’s handling of this individual incident was, it probably won’t cause them to go under. It will, however, almost certainly cost them a lot more in lost business than they saved by not handling it better. That’s good enough for me.
Then again, aren’t you that same luminary who recently referred to a vicious thug who murdered four innocent people in cold blood to eliminate witnesses, never admitted to (let alone apologized for) the crimes, plotted a prison break that would have involved at least two more murders if it had been carried out according to plan (and God knows how many more if it hadn’t), refused to tell the authorities what he knew about the inner workings of an extremely violent gang he had been an integral part of for years (and even falsely claimed to have co-founded), and allowed some untalented groupie to slap his name on a few horrendously insipid books bought and read by fewer people than read this blog, as a “harmless black storybook writer?” With a track record like that, attempting to reason with you on any issue is probably just a waste of both my time and yours. I will say this, though: if you really believe that crap you’re spewing about the evils of corporations, feel free to buy as many shares of unlimited companies (those where shareholders are held personally liable if the company defaults on its obligations) as you like. Me, I’ll pass.
January 4th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
No airline could survive without at least provision A.
Otherwise every time there was bad weather or an ATC delay or an emergency with another airline’s plane… they’d be in violation of their contract with you.
For obvious reasons nobody will do business on terms like that.
January 4th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Some version of A may be reasonable, sure, but a wholesale “we can take as long as we want, whenever we want, for any reason or no reason” provision is not. Even a reasonable version of A probably isn’t strictly necessary, a basic force majeure clause would be plenty to deal with emergencies, ATC delays, and everything else beyond the airline’s reasonable control.
January 4th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
I don’t object to paragraph A as presented in the contract; it strikes me as being a hedging of responsibility that is no less than I would expect.
HOWEVER, I do expect the attitude of a company which has failed to “transport with reasonable dispatch” to be apologetic, and for them to go out of their way to attempt to ameliorate the problem. Not because the contract requires it, but because that’s just good customer service.
January 4th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Jeeze xrlq, you could have just responded that way to my tookie post when I made it, rather than letting it fester and turn into a red herring response to this particular comment …
Be honest: You’re all about corporations screwing over the little guy (because you identify with the screwer, not the screwee) until the little guy is you — and then you whine about it like a baby.
And no, they probably aren’t going to lose business jut because they screw people. And if they are, it doesn’t matter, because there’s always someone else waiting in the wings to take their place screwing over the consumer. It’s endless, and it’s how the corporate shareholders make their money.
As for whether I’d be happy owning an unlimited liability company, sure it’s nice to have limited liability. Is it worth the trade-off — passing the risk of negligence, mistakes and bad behaviour on to someone else? I don’t know. It’s great when you’re on one end, and it sucks when you’re on the other.
The fact is, someone has to bear the cost when a corporation causes an injury — if it’s not a shareholder (i.e., after the corporation’s capital runs dry), it’s the person the shareholder’s company screwed. Objectively there’s no gain (other than increased investment in corporations, which is supposedly a good thing — at least that’s what the people who own corporations tell us).
January 4th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Or you could have avoided the issue entirely by thinking before you type, and not having made such a ludicrous comment in the first place. Your call.
Here’s an even better idea: how about you be honest, and admit you don’t know a f’n thing about what I am “all about,” who I identify with, or any of the other crap you moonbats pretend to know about all non-moonbats. Go ahead, search my archives, I’ll wait. I defy you to produce a single entry that can reasonably be described as me justifying anybody screwing anybody. You will, however, find plenty of other examples of me criticizing corporations for doing so.
Of course they are. They certainly lost me as a potential customer, and I doubt I’m alone.
Translation: it’s the guy who did business with a corporation, knowing full well that it was a corporation with limited liability, and now feels “screwed” because the risk he chose to take on ended up materializing. Or, in some cases, it’s the guy who screwed them by bankrupting the company with a huge class action, and now whines that the company he bankrupted can’t pay the judgement he won. If you’re really that worried about the rare bird who can’t collect a legitimate tort award from a bankrupt company, you should be advocating some kind of government insurance program to cover such situations, paid for by a portion of the corporate income taxes government is already collecting. If/when that premium gets higher than the tax collected, then and only then will it make sense to entertain the possiblity that limited liability is a net negative rather than a net positive to society, or that it is even close.
Them, and the people who work for corporations, buy things made by corporations, use government services paid in part by corporate income and/or capital gains taxes, or have their heads screwed on tight enough to realize that they benefit in any other way from large companies, most of which are run quite well, and none of which could exist without limited liability. But if you really doubt that increased investment in business (or for that matter, any investment at all) is a good thing, try living in a country that lacks it. There are plenty of these anti-capitalist nirvanas out there for you to choose from.
January 4th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
I don’t know. Section A could add a fun, new “kick” to air travel! “We’ll put you on the plane, but no one knows where you’ll go and when you’ll get there.” Like a fun surprise package. One trip you’ll end up in enjoying the frozen tundra of Alaska, another the balmy breezes of the Bahamas!
January 4th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
I must say I’m impressed that AirTran could lose you over this; they lost me years ago, when they were still called ValuJet.
That particular mistake was inexcusable.
January 4th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
OK, now I’m particularly unimpressed - with myself, for not knowing AirTran was ValuJet. If I’d have known that, I’d never have considered flying with them at all.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
No kidding. Now they’re definitely off my list. Not like they were on it anyway.
Too bad Patrick doesn’t have military orders. The one time we had to deal with this, American screwed DH out of a connection from DFW to Killeen (home of Ft. Hood). When he showed them his orders and told them MPs would be arriving shortly if they didn’t fix it, they got him back to Ft. Hood on Delta ASAP via Houston…..
January 5th, 2006 at 4:23 am
“it’s the guy who did business with a corporation, knowing full well that it was a corporation with limited liability, and now feels “screwed” because the risk he chose to take on ended up materializing.”
Yeah, and the guy who wakes up after being dropped in a lion’s den deals with lions, knowing full well they’re lions. It doesn’t mean he hasn’t gotten screwed by whoever dropped him in the lions’ den.
For over 100 years, rich business interests have been carefully shoring up liability limitations for those with wealth and power. You can’t live and intereact in modern society without “doing business with a corporation” every five minutes (on a slow day.) This isn’t a matter of choice, it’s a matter of complete necessity. Who the hell wakes up in the morning and says “hmmm, I think maybe I’ll try doing business with one of those ‘corporations’ today.”
“Them, and the people who work for corporations, buy things made by corporations, use government services paid in part by corporate income and/or capital gains taxes, or have their heads screwed on tight enough to realize that they benefit in any other way from large companies, most of which are run quite well, and none of which could exist without limited liability.”
As far as I can tell, this argument is essentially “corporations are good because they exist, and the average individual has figured out a way to survive among them.” I can’t argue with the latter two statements; I just don’t think they justify the preceeding conclusion.
January 5th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
On the other hand, what kind of idiot do you have to be to fly the notorious AirTran around holiday time on a tight schedule with your young children in tow?
After a certain point, you can no longer protect people from the foolishness of their actions.
January 7th, 2006 at 3:22 am
PHIL: are you really this poorly informed? Business is about giving the customer what they want. Whether a public corporation or private business, the customer is always right and any business that does not satisfy the customer loses patronage and eventually goes out of business. You obviously know nothing about economics, capitalism or free enterprise. If you don’t like the service or product of a company, DON’T USE IT. There are many ways to travel, airlines being only one of them. If you’re getting screwed, its because YOU’RE the world’s biggest idiot, not because corporations are trying to screw you. Corporations make profits by providing services that people want and by providing that service better than other competing businesses. The best provider wins. And the worst provider makes less profit and may go out of business. Unfortunately, this process involve the customer have SOME intelligence and SOME wisdom, so there is absolutely no doubt that you will get screwed because you lack any intelligence whatsoever and possess absolutely no wisdom.
January 7th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Pendleton, your idealism about capitalism is as misinformed as the charicature of socialist idealism you are attempting to paint me as.
Let me give you an example of how hard it is to be an intelligent consumer these days: What percentage of the contracts to which you are a party have you actually read?
Start with your bank account and credit card contracts. Have you read them all? Do you know exactly what your obligations are, and just as importantly, what you’ve agreed to let your banks/credit cards do with your money and information?
These banks have hundreds of lawyers drafting these air-tight contracts for them. Have you ever, even once, had a lawyer review any of these contracts? If you haven’t you’re a chump. But if you have, you’re a chump, too, because the cost of having a lawyer pore through the contract for you at hundreds of dollars an hour is rediculously high.
This airline contract XLRQ is moaning about is another good example. Do you read the full contract you’re agreeing to when you buy a plane ticket? Buy a cell phone? Buy a peice of software?
Have you read your entire health insurance contract? Many are a hundred or more pages. If you don’t read them, you’re entering into binding agreements with a corporation that has tons of lawyers on their side trying to draft a contract that will serve them well and protect them completely from you: and you’re blissfully agreeing to it without having a clue of what it says.
Yet if you were to read all the contracts you enter into day by day, you’d have very little time left for anything else. Yet you are held, as a legal citizen of the U.S., to be an equal to a corporation with hundreds of lawyers.
When things go wrong, and you say “but wait, I’m getting screwed,” it’s too late. You agreed to the contract. They’re fully protected, and you’re naked, helpless, and forced to bear the entire loss caused by their bad behaviour. All you can do is say “damnit, I hope they screw enough other people that they eventually go out of business.”
What a great system!
January 7th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Or you can do as Patterico and I did, and publicize their screwiness as widely as possible, so other people won’t have to get personally screwed by them to know better. After screwing Patterico, Valujet/AirTran lost any prospect of screwing me, CTG, and hundreds of others. Now, if they ever get an opportunity to screw you, you have no one but yourself to blame.
The only down side to relying on sunlight as disinfectant is getting occasional flames from moonbats who think I should be bashing all corporations solely for being corporations, rather than singling out the individual corporations that have done something to deserve it.
Like democracy, it’s a lousy system but it beats the alternatives. I’d rather deal with an occasional AirTran here and there than go back to the bad old days of ultra-regulated, butt-expensive air travel - though I’m sure corporate shills like you would be delighted by that, as regulated air travel was far less competitive, and therefore much more profitable, to the eeeeevil corporations. And your proposal - making individual shareholders vicariously liable for everything a large company does - would grind the entire economy to a halt. Sorry, I’ll stick with the current system, warts and all.
January 8th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
So you think it’s better for you and Pat and various others who have already born the cost of your individual screwing, to pay an even higher cost, in the desperate hope that you might save others from getting screwed — all to protect the holy Shareholders and allow them to continue to see a tidy profit from screwing those who you fail to save.
What’s so important about making individual consumers bear the cost of bad business behaviour, instead of passing the cost on to those who BENEFIT from that bad behaviour, namely the shareholders? Oh, wait, I remember … “the entire economy would grind to a halt” if we let those who actually caused the harm pay for it. Whatever.
I’ll tell you what I think the reasoning is: a dumb, unwavering loyalty to protect the right to screw another person and get away with it if you get a chance. Those who still hold fast to the hope that one day they might benefit from royally screwing someone else will support that right to the end — what keeps them going is the hope that one day they’ll be the screwer rather than the screwee. That’s the only explanation I can think of.
Also, you never even bothered to address my point about the absurdly one-sided contracts we all are helpless to avoid entering into without becoming either effectively Amish, or full-time lawyers. Again, as far as I can tell, the only reason you can support letting others screw people this way is because you’re hoping against hope that one day you too will be able to screw people that way.
Finally … the word “moonbat” means “someone who won’t agree with me” right? As far as I can tell, among the incredibly broad range of people you apply the term to, that’s the only thing they all have in common. You use it so much it’s starting to sound like a tick.
January 9th, 2006 at 9:54 am
If by “screw” you mean “do business, then yes, absolutely. The alternative, which you keep avoiding while carping about the evils of corporations, is to live in a Third World country where commerce as we know it cannot exist. If shareholders were held vicariously liable for the actions of the company, no one in his right mind would want to own a single share of any publicly traded company. If you think only bad companies get sued, and then only for “screwing” people, then you seriously need to get out more.
No, moron, we already DO let those who cause a harm pay for it. What we don’t do, thank God, is hold shareholders vicariously liable for acts that they didn’t do, and given that their shares are now worthless, didn’t profit from, either.
That’s because you don’t know the first thing about running a business, yet somehow feel qualified to hold a strong opinion on the issue anyway. Try actually running a business the way you claim all businesses are run, and you may well end up in prison. You’ll almost certainly end up with a bankrupt company, not a profit. In fact, to the extent you personally committed the acts that constituted screwing, you may find out that your “limited” liability wasn’t so damned limited after all. The only person it will protect is the person you managed to con into investing in your scam - and only to the extent that his losses will be limited to his bad investment. Of course you don’t care; for all your whining and moaning about businesses supposedly “screwing” customers simply by doing business with them, you don’t seem to care a hoot about innocent investors actually getting screwed by companies they had no control over.
I’ve dealt with that issue before, though like everything else you pontificated about, it’s not as cut and dried as you make it out to be. In any event, it’s irrelevant to your idiotic idea that corporations should not be allowed to exist at all. It is funny, though, how quick you are to use the Amish as an example of how we’d all have to live to avoid adhesion contracts, even while advocating the end of all the corporations in the country who account for the difference between how the Amish live and how we do.
If it meant that I’d have to call just about every commenter a “moonbat,” which I don’t do. Seven people, including at least one liberal other than you, have commented on this thread. Only one has been called a “moonbat.” That’s not to say I’ve never used the term to describe anyone else - of course I have - but I defy you to produce a single example of someone I’ve called a “moonbat” who had not done or said anything extreme or knee-jerk enough to warrant it. Admittedly, I don’t have a coherent definition of “moonbat” at my fingertips, but like Potter Stewart and his ever elusive obscenity, moonbattery is something I know when I see it. And while there are close cases, you’re not one of them. If the term moonbat means anything at all, it has to include anyone who describes a multiple cold-blooded murder as “harmless” and advocates an anti-business law too radical for the most liberal state in the union (or for that matter, for France, Germany or any other remotely industrialized country in the world), without even trying to propose a workable alternative in its place.
January 9th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
If anything is knee-jerk, it’s your willingness to trot out the word “moonbat” at anyone who hesitates at wholeheartedly adopting your violent, intolerant view of reality in which those who show mercy, forgiveness, compassion or concern for those less fortunate/lucky are simply insane.
Or at least that’s how you come off from my perspective. Your posts are consistently hateful, mean-spirited, bitter and most important, merciless. You’re definitely in top 1 percent of merciless writers I’ve read; it takes serious strain to see even the possibility that you might have compassion, somewhere in there.
The only thing I agree with you on at all is the possibility that there may be nothing better than the eat-what-you-kill killer-take-all economic system we have; but frankly, I can’t get excited about vigorously arguing day after day for THAT perspective. It can take care of itself very nicely, and has throughout history. Yet for some reason, that’s the side that gets you energized. No idea why.
So I’m going to take a break .. I need sleep tonight. Try and once look at someone like me, who sees the good in the (many, many) people you hate, as something other than a “moonbat” will ya?
January 9th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Translated: I’m willing to trot out the word “moonbat” at anyone who thinks that the difference between murdering four innocent people in cold blood and not murdering anyone is a matter of fortune/luck. Which is true.
This from the guy who comes perilously close to accusing all Republicans of racism, flat-out accuses me of supporting shady business practices, lectures me further about what I’m supposedly all about despite never having so much as met me, and idly speculates that everyone who doesn’t see things his way must be privately hoping for a chance to screw someone else over. Now, to top it all off, you have the gall to accuse me of being hateful, mean-spirited and bitter. That’s rich indeed.
I don’t hate people just because they are moonbats. I ridicule them because they are moonbats. There is a difference. As to seeing you as anything but a moonbat, all I can say is that I’m unable to “see” any part of you that you haven’t presented on this blog. Introducing yourself by calling a hardened murderer “harmless” and questioning the motives of those who were happy not to see the 1992 riots all over again was not a good start. Neither was attacking me for supposedly supporting corporations who screw individual customers, especially in a comment to a post in which I had just gotten done attacking a corporation for doing just that. So you’ll have to excuse me for only seeing the side of you which you’ve chosen to put on display.
January 10th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Allow me to pipe up with a different CoC, than what you find with AirTran (F9) or American (AA).
Northwest (NW) was the unwanted impetus for the proposed “Passengers Bill of Rights”. The Big 6 airlines rushed to try to put in customer service “standards” to head off Federal intervention. It worked.
I agree that the F9 CoC is completely one-sided in favor of the airline. Allow me to post the relevant section from the NW CoC, which is vastly different, (pardon the all caps, but that’s a result of cut & paste):
http://www.nwa.com/plan/contract2.pdf (pages 108-9)
NW will transport you on their next flight, or, if not acceptable to the pax, on other carriers, or if that’s not acceptable, will refund the money. Also, you may end up with a free upgrade if that’s the only seat available.
The catch line in the CoC deals with the arrangements with other airlines. In general, the legacy airlines have extensive interline agreements, while F9, Southwest and the like tend to have none. Which means you are on a transportation “island”.
January 10th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Thanks for the tip. But isn’t F9 the code for Frontier Airlines, not AirTran (which, IIRC, is FL?
January 10th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
I stand corrected. Was involved in an email conversation about Frontier and must have kept F9 on my brain.
FL is AirTran (from their roots in Florida) and WAS the code for the “old” Frontier that merged into PeoplExpress years ago.
F9 is the “new” Frontier, that currently operates with Airbus equipment with animal photos on the tail.
Southwest is WN, JetBlue is B6, and HP was America West.
Time to do my penance by reading old copies of the OAG.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Ride Greyhound next time acehole!!