
My father had a lifelong ticket to fly anywhere. Then they took it away - gaisturiz
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/sep/19/american-airlines-aairpass-golden-ticket
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bonjurkes
dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20510933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20510933)

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whamlastxmas
I have mixed feelings about this. It's clearly a wealthy guy being written
about by his privileged daughter and he was was pretty reckless in using his
unlimited pass. Entitled, maybe. It's hard to have much empathy. He missed 84%
of his booked flights. That's a huge amount, and he did the same for his
companion pass. He said himself that the pass had paid for itself for how much
he flew so it's not exactly like AA is taking advantage of some middle class
nobody that spent a significant chunk of their lifetime income on this.

Still, AA was shitty in their response. It was dumb of AA to offer this to
begin with. And the author's dad was clearly struggling with depression,
substance abuse, and grief.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I guess I just find the
eccentric details of the lives of the wealthy to be tiresome to read about.

edit: I guess this is a dupe and these thoughts were all already expressed in
old version

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bb88
So missing 84% of booked flights is not like a big deal on scale the size of
American. Notably because the seat just will just open up for someone else to
sit in. Either the plane leaves full of passengers or it doesn't. It was also
pretty common practice to overbook flights starting in the 2000's.

As to the confusion of self with your airline status, I would say it's pretty
bad if you were able to fly anywhere for free especially for 20 years, and
then lost that ability. However, it just means you would pay for flights,
which seems like something fairly easy to get over, especially if you're
wealthy.

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dariusj18
As long as they refund him with interest I'd say it was fair-ish.

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vectorEQ
to be honest, if someone is sold a 'lifelong pass', it should be lifelong,
regardless of the status of the individual, it's a fraud to give him anything
less.

if they found at the end it was a mistake to give out such tickets, that's
their problem ,not the end user's problem.

in light of fraud of the user, for example giving the lifelong pass to use by
other individuals (obviously not the intended purpose of the thing) i could
expect it to be withdrawn. but that would only apply if these limitations were
clearly stated or noted on the purchase.

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velcrovan
I bought "lifetime hosting" from Joyent. They cancelled the deal after about
seven years, then fobbed us off onto a spinoff shell company that imploded
even before it launched.

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Stratoscope
For the curious:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Textdrive](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Textdrive)

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smhenderson
OT but is it just me or algolia down today? I tried a search earlier and just
now clicked your link. I'm getting...

 _We 're sorry — something's gone wrong. Our team has been notified and will
look into resolving this issue! Go back to home page_

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jacknews
When something's too good to be true ....

