Bad faith? How many of those cancelled tickets were just re-booked for an earlier/later flight, or a day later?
The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties for flight changes is because, if it were free or cheap to do so, everybody would constantly be adjusting their travel arrangements. Almost every airline trip I book, by the time it actually comes, I wish I could take a slightly different flight time or day.
>> 17 flights a week
So what? Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?
>> The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties...
Scheduling and logistics is a perfectly good reason for having these expectations. Airlines have horrible margins (< 10%) in even good years, and fuel and staff isn't free. Planning is kind of a big deal in an industry like this, and you can't do that if everything is last minute.
>> Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?
He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse. Maybe 10%? Sure.20%? Pushing it, but I could see that in special circumstances. Once you're cancelling 5-6x more flights than you're actually going on, there's a problem.
Changing/cancelling a 2-day-old reservation 6 months out -- not "last minute" -- has a negligible cost. However, AA will still charge a non-elite customer $200. If you could prove that the majority of Mr. Rothstein's cancellations were made within a week, even a month, of the actual flight, perhaps I'd agree with you, but that data is not available to us, and his daughter inferred that many tickets were cancelled within a day or two.
You are using AA's chosen nomenclature against Mr. Rothstein. Was he truly "cancelling" or just changing the date/time/stopover most of these times (which AA would call a cancel/re-issue)? What about changing his seat at the gate -- the agent rips up the boarding pass and issues a new one. Is that considered a cancellation? If I was in court trying to amplify percentages to disparage someone, I'd probably say it was.
> He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse.
I just want to chime in here and point out that the exit clause in the contract required fraudulent usage. American was certainly getting royally screwed by the deal they made, and the pattern of Rothstein's reservations and cancellations was certainly not normal. But what took thousands of billable hours for lawyers to resolve seems to be specifically whether his behavior rose to the level of fraud.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Booking tickets under fake names, whether for your luggage or for random people you may meet at the airport and want to travel with, is fraud. Full stop.
Fraud requires you to deceive people. If AA tell you to book under a fake name for the spare seat, you do it, and then they cheerfully watch you walk on with whoever, that's not fraud. They know exactly what's happening.
an AA phone operator is not the same as an AA legal representative. they can make mistakes.
> If AA tell you
besides, the sentence touches explicitly on this claim
" paragraph 17(d) of the AAirpass Agreement is clear: “American’s failure to enforce any of its rights under this Agreement shall not constitute a waiverof such rights,” "
which is pretty much standard if you ask me. tolerance doesn't constitute acceptance and there was a warning about this, which he tried worked around using real names of relatives that then didn't travel for the vast majority of bookings, making further claim of ignorance tenuous at best and dubious in general.
The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties for flight changes is because, if it were free or cheap to do so, everybody would constantly be adjusting their travel arrangements. Almost every airline trip I book, by the time it actually comes, I wish I could take a slightly different flight time or day.
>> 17 flights a week So what? Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?