

Refund.me: making you cash from your flight delays - itsybaev
http://venturevillage.eu/startup-of-the-week-refund-me

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joezydeco
Here I was thinking it was a travel booking website that tried to find the
least-optimal flight schedule on planes that were always overbooked,
increasing your chances for a bump & compensation.

So if anyone wants to work on _that_ idea, I'm all for it.

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1337biz
Running a professional bump&compensation fund sounds like a fun project. Would
love to see how this works out. At the same time it would be a consumer-
protection service as it would de-incentivize airlines from overbooking
flights.

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PeterisP
Actually, all the stuff that I read about overbooking flights seems strange,
as I (and my colleagues) have flown a lot and have never even seen such an
incident of overbooking.

It may be that excessive overbooking is an USA-specific issue, and here in EU
airlines are already deincentivized from this due to the compensations they
would have to pay.

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bazzargh
I've had it happen to me 4 times (BA, BM) on the Friday flights back to
Glasgow. Compensated every time, in all but one case cash in hand. I was also
offered an overnight stay in Prague when they overbooked my flight back to
Schipol, but unfortunately I'd switched flights to Zurich moments before they
told me.

I did have one odd delay with EasyJet - not due to overcrowding - where our
plane from Luton to Glasgow was reassigned to a flight to Malta - probably
because _they_ were about to hit the limit for compensation - and Stelios,
then the owner of the airline, took the flight up with us to apologise in
person to every passenger.

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rb2k_
I used flightright ( <http://www.flightright.eu/> ) once when the leap second
took down the whole air france booking system. Was a pretty easy process and I
got some money back. I like the general idea.

Looking at refund.me, I see a service I might want to use but I also see a lot
of things that distract me from using the service.

Here's an annotated version of the frontpage:

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s28/sh/d6d22247-63f2-4ec7-967...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s28/sh/d6d22247-63f2-4ec7-9678-f1ca7af1bd69/4c6b1666d38135a7eebc3a2ad0e17fde)

(this might sound harsh, but I really like what you guys are doing :) )

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sebkomianos
Hey rb2k_, cool comment! Care to "alpha test" my MVP in about a week's time?

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rb2k_
I don't currently have a grudge with any airline :)

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jedberg
This entire business is predicated on a government sanctioned extortion of the
airlines. The moment this thing gets popular, the airlines would lobby the
government heavily to remove the regulations and tank the business.

A good idea while it lasts though. :)

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PeterisP
As if they weren't lobbying already for many years. No, here in EU legislators
actually do pay more attention to consumer rights than companies - at least in
the mass-markets that they understand, unlike software.

This legislation has been here for a long time and will stay, although the
manual process is a bit of a hassle, it's still worth the money. And it's not
extortion, it's how a normal deal should work - we had an agreement and I paid
you to do X; you didn't fulfill your part and caused me damages (wasted time,
missed connection flights, etc) - so pay up. In USA the same principle
(damages from breach of contract) should apply, simply there it's too
expensive to enforce your rights, so airlines get away with shafting you.

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rtpg
I don't understand why there's this myth that there are no rules in the US.

[http://www.consumertraveler.com/today/dots-new-
rules-%E2%80%...](http://www.consumertraveler.com/today/dots-new-
rules-%E2%80%94-overbooking-tarmac-delays-lost-baggage/)

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robertskmiles
Seems to me that this app doesn't use any advanced android features, so
requiring android 4.0 is needlessly excluding a lot of potential customers.

Edit: Almost 60% of android users, in fact. [1]

[1]: <http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html>

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nemothekid
In my experience, this usually occurs because you naively use a seemingly
simple API function that only supports 4.0, but would take significant time to
backport. (I've done this accidently with the DownloadManager API when I
needed to support pre-Gingerbread apps).

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brucehart
I can't remember the name of it, but there is a company that does something
similar for shipping delays with UPS and FedEx. A company that ships a lot of
packages can get thousands in rebates since a percentage of those deliveries
will probably be late. Are there any other industries where rebates often go
unclaimed?

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aberkowitz
I think the service you're thinking of is called PackageFox.

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brucehart
Yes, that's it!

