You can pick up the original story here, if you want to, but
the gist is simple enough. When the hero of our story arrived at the gate and
attempted to board the aircraft, the ramp agent attempted to scan the bar codes
on his boarding pass – a method of tracking passengers that is becoming
increasingly common at US airports. Unfortunately, the scanner failed to read
the codes on the first and second try. Since the line was long and the time to
departure was short, the agent gave up and just let the passenger board, no
doubt planning to manually enter the boarding information later. In the event,
however, the agent either forgot about the manual update or was too busy to
take care of it before the company’s computer system noted the “no-show” and
cancelled the man’s non-refundable ticket…
I’ve written in this space before about the somewhat
questionable ethics of non-refundable tickets, but apparently I missed the
single most corrosive aspect of such products: the fact that people with
non-refundable tickets miss their flights just as often as anyone else, and will
then make up whatever preposterous story they can think of in order to convince
the airline to refund their money or replace their ticket. After a few years
(or possibly less, in some cases) of listening to stories that are filled with
whining, vitriol, or outright insults to their intelligence, the airline’s
customer service personnel have gotten fed up with the entire situation and are
apparently refusing to listen anymore – it’s hard evidence or nothing, and the
passenger in our story didn’t keep a receipt from either airport, let alone
retain his boarding pass…
Now, I don’t want to rag on Southwest Airlines in
particular; I know that all of the major airlines have regulations like this,
and I imagine that all of them are having the same issues with their customer
service personnel, at least to the extent that they weren’t already. What I
think is getting lost in this story is just how lightly the airline is getting
off, given the potential disaster they were courting. The linked story is mainly
focused on the airline cancelling their customer’s non-refundable ticket and
refusing to refund the replacement ticket he had to buy to get home following
their screw-up, but imagine if they had given away his seat before the airplane
left the ground. Southwest generally doesn’t have assigned seating, which means
they would have been left with an airplane with 180 passenger seats and 181
people aboard - and no way to tell who the imposter really was…
Even worse, though, would be the case in which the passenger
really didn’t board, but his luggage already had. This would violate any number
of Federal safety regulations, possibly resulting in massive fines or other
sanctions against the company – which would still be less of a fiasco than if
the passenger had placed a bomb in his checked luggage and then failed to check
in. In this case, the airline didn’t get around to cancelling the passenger’s
ticket until he and his luggage were already in the air, which means that no
one had the chance to take note of his absence and pull his suitcase out of the
cargo hold, either. And while it’s true that the odds of a random murderous
psychopath attempting to bring down any specific airplane are very small, they
aren’t quite zero – and I wouldn’t want to be the one who tried to use that as
a legal defense in either civil or criminal proceedings…
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