The post concludes that because Air France eventually agreed to compensate the passenger, they must have been lying to the passenger initially.
I think it's more likely that they decided it would be cheaper to pay the claim than to continue denying it, which would incur costs on their end to provide documentation and defend its denial.
Happens all the time with legal settlements. It's not an indication of actual guilt.
Actually, I have been through this and they will absolutely lie, and gaslight you with all kinds of nonsense.
I have a series of screenshots and recordings where United would change information on their official app from, say, insufficient crew, to crew rest, to blaming weather. Had to take them to court (their delays cost us thousands) and won thanks to demonstrating how they altered their own information to blame everyone but themselves.
> I have a series of screenshots and recordings where United would change information on their official app from, say, insufficient crew, to crew rest, to blaming weather.
Is very close to one of the many ways Best Buy got in trouble. Back in the day, their website would detect if you were looking at the website from a store-associated IP address, and display different pricing.
So when you shopped around at home and found your $200 hard drive, went to the store and saw that it was $300, the clerk could pull up the website and say "oh, no, you were mistaken, see?"
That started falling apart when cellular data plans became common place and people turned off Wifi and said "Well, huh, when I'm not connected to your network it shows a lower price. Please explain."
(Then there's the retailer specific SKUs... "Sorry sir, this hard drive is a WD8TB7200-BBY, not a WD8TB7200-AMZN, so it's not eligible for price matching"...)
I took an airline to the small claims court last year, and they settled when it entered the mandatory arbitration phase. They never really had any good reason for denying the claim, and the evidence (including emails on the day of cancellation) supported my compensation claim.
I think the modus operandi is simply to deny and obfuscate everything. That probably works 95+% of the time, as it takes a certain amount of motivation and effort to actually go through a small claim (even though it is ridiculously simple these days). My wife told me she would never have bothered.
So, they probably ultimately save a lot of money by doing this, even though it is annoying and nefarious.
> I think the modus operandi is simply to deny and obfuscate everything. That probably works 95+% of the time
Is this why many credit cards offer no/few questions asked travel insurance in case of airline fault? They know they’ll get a refund and they know how to work the process
It's funny, I've had this issue with one of the most cost-cutting airlines before (Ryanair). And they just paid right out. A lot more than the ticket for the flight sector had cost, too.
And it was due to the airport being closed for inclement weather. Not even their fault.
I travel a lot, so I’ve had quite a few disputes with airlines over the years. My experience statutory compensation is that a lot of airlines train their frontline staff to think it simply doesn’t exist, and that you have to escalate to get anywhere. I’ve also experienced a few that will ignore your first few escalation attempts before finally giving in and paying up. I’ve never gotten all the way to court, but I’ve always been left with the impression that certain airlines are simply adopting the approach of making it as tedious as possible hoping you’d give up.
I think the correct perspective is that they lie as an organization. Sure individually maybe no single person is obviously lying, but as a whole they certainly are.
I've worked on the software side of airline ticketing. I would bet any amount of money's that they were lying. Not just AirFrance, every airline.
They also drag their feet on paying their software contractors. The company I worked for also had a digital adslvertising agency department. There were multiple times we had to threaten to pause all their Google and Facebook advertising campaigns until they paid. One time we actually had to do that, we had an email that payment was sent about 10 minutes later.
This is a lesson that large corporations will always assume laziness on the part of the unwashed masses in order to cut costs. An individual doing their homework will put a wrench in their plans.
If we had stronger consumer protection laws, corporations wouldn't be able to hide behind all these obstacles they themselves create to generate profit.
The default should be "customer gets the refund" and the corporation needs to prove the refund should not happen.
Imagine being able to do a one step dispute with a consumer protection agency. The business in question would have 30 days to challenge in small claims court in the local jurisdiction. Consumer gets a letter in the mail about the determination with no effort beyond the initial dispute.
No underfunding the customer service phone lines, hoping to wear down the consumer. No hiding behind a self constructed obstacle course.
The corporate entity can run through a ninja warrior obstacle course to deny a refund.
Laziness is a poor choice of words in this instance - a combination of lack of knowledge about the laws, perception of low chance winning against the goliaths that are airlines and a (probably correct) cost-benefit analysis favoring inaction is more accurate.
> I think it's more likely that they decided it would be cheaper to pay the claim than to continue denying it, which would incur costs on their end to provide documentation and defend its denial.
Except...
they already stated they HAD investigated and reviewed things, and that's HOW they found that it was "ATC delay". So they already had the documentation...
You assume that it's the same type or level of documentation, official communication with regulatory offices might require a lot more work than answering a passenger.
It’s not an indication of guilt in a legal sense, but non-liable parties often become less rational about the financial stakes when they believe the law is on their side, even if only to protect their reputation. At least in my experience. Anecdata, not a lawyer, etc. But I have been a recipient of a nontrivial settlement larger than negotiators were planning to offer, where the previous case history was in my favor. And I have seen the opposite play out when the same other party apparently sincerely believed they were in the right.
Settling is generally legally neutral, but it’s not inherently exonerating in a social sense either.
If this was a case of turning up for arbitration, sure, that's lots of paid staff time wasted. But if they already had enough information to provide to the customer service to provide a summary to the customer, it shouldn't be that much harder to provide the raw info to ANAC. It may not be fully automated, but... At few hundred $ per claim, an existing semi-automated process would surely pay for itself if their objections were true, right?
It's likely way more complicated in practice, but I don't immediately buy the "it's cheaper not to fight it" idea, if the request is just for information they already have.
There is another possibility: because the first leg plane was late, it missed the pushback at 09:40 and then again 09:56 and the ATC put the plane at the end of the queue for takeoff until 10:48. ~~Though I can't imagine Lisbon to be such a busy airport to have an hour-long queue of departures, who knows.~~[1] In any case, if ATC denied takeoff/pushback because Air France missed the schedule, AF could not blame the ATC.
I think it's more likely that they decided it would be cheaper to pay the claim than to continue denying it, which would incur costs on their end to provide documentation and defend its denial.
Happens all the time with legal settlements. It's not an indication of actual guilt.