This doesn't surprise me one bit from my experience with Lufthansa. They love to blame the customer for everything, especially when they (LH) screw up.
EDIT: This is a great example of where a corporation should suffer criminal charges. But given Germany's protection of their flag carrier.. it won't happen.
The gate was announced about an hour before the gate closure, and by the time we'd got to the gate (~5 minutes) we were informed that the bag drop was closed. We had a brief argument, and they reluctantly took the bags. Insane.
That airport has no centralized check-ins anywhere. I have no idea how you would spend any amount there without just going to the gate indicated on the screens everywhere. Most people who don’t know it don’t even notice the difference. They just see it saying “A21” and follow he signs to A21.
It’s actually a rather well-liked concept because check in, passport control, and security only serve that one flight at a time. It’s faster, and you will never miss your flight because of people in front of you in a queue booked on a later flight.
Alas, it requires more personnel, and the airport will close soonish.
This is not a great example of anything else, despite your hyperbole.
Why can't we just pay our money, get our ticket, and then decide on our own whether we want to use it or not?
In that case, can the airline decide to simply not run the flight and keep everyone's money? It's a contract because both sides have accepted some number of terms. If it weren't you would forego all sorts of protections. When you (reasonably) want those back... guess what? Disputes are decided on the terms of the (sales) contract. How else would it work?
Maybe if a ticket actually held some sort guarantee for getting a seat on an airplane things would be different...
No they don't. They overbook to maximize profits, yes. It sucks and is completely anti-consumer, yes. However, they do not simply send you packing. They re-book you. You also agree to it when you buy the ticket. Again, yes, it's buried in the contract and since every airline does it you really have no choice.
It's far from perfect/fair, but that has nothing to do with what I responded to. If "everything doesn't have to be a contract" then you have no legal recourse. Ever. Sales need to be contracts in the eyes of the law, but that doesn't mean everything is perfect.
Then we should also look at departure times, how often has a flight been delayed? Many people count on getting where they are going on time. That should also count as a breach of contract as well.
Edit: To take this to the absurd, you have to pay to make any changes to your ticket at after a certain point in time i.e. name. So when you receive the ticket and it has a gate listed, is that also part of the contract? I am not allowed to change anything printed there without paying, why should they be allowed?
Or do we say that things happen and we allow systems to be lenient?
I agree that technically it's breach of contract. The trouble is that humans who aren't lawyers think of tickets as options instead of futures. They think they're buying the right to board instead of an obligation to board.
I can also see the human-positive side effect. The marginal cost of an extra bum in a seat isn't high, so it makes sense to fill up the plane, but the economics only work out if there's enough people who pay more.
There are lots of ways to differentiate between these sets of people - service levels, flexibility, calendar patterns. But the internet reduces the price information asymmetry that calendar patterns rely on, and so we've come to this court case: making it a hard constraint rather than hoodwinking the relatively price insensitive business traveller.