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Comment by 23B1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

Everyone has a KPI, including the airline’s general counsel

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.

People love to rag on Ryanair but they get the job done admirably for the price you pay.

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.

Do they lie or have they set up a system of such intentional incompetence that no individual drone actually has to lie?

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.

What was their defense in court?

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