Pilot Nick - 5 min read
It’s past midnight at the gate in Denver. You boarded at 11:30, felt the airplane push back, rolled out toward the runway, and then felt it turn around. Now the agent at the podium says the flight is canceled, there are no hotel vouchers, and you should book a room yourself and send in your receipts.
You do. A few weeks later, the airline writes back and calls the whole thing “force majeure.”
The cause was a toilet.
Smart Traveller is my recurring series for the passenger side of the trip: seats, connections, airports, jet lag, and what to do when a flight goes wrong. Every article follows the same rules: it’s written from the left seat for the person in row 23, it gives you something to use on your next trip, and it says plainly what I’d do in your place.
I just read this one in The New York Times, in Seth Kugel’s Tripped Up column, and it stayed with me. It happened to a Colorado couple on Turkish Airlines’ Denver to Istanbul flight on May 30. The good news first: they got their $512 back. The bad news is how close they came to not getting it, and what Kugel found when he looked at other cases.
I’ve spent 28 years and more than 12,000 hours up front. From the flight deck, that night looked very different from the way the airline described it, and the difference is what gets your receipts paid.
The next canceled flight could be yours. A mechanical cancellation can leave you paying for a hotel at 1 a.m., and the airline decides weeks later what to call it. Neal got his $512 back. Kugel’s other three readers never saw theirs, and the difference was what each of them could prove.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. It covers what was happening under that cabin floor and why “force majeure” doesn’t hold up. Then comes the playbook I’d use myself: what to collect before you step off the airplane, the three sets of rules that cover an international flight and the order to use them in, the credit card step most travelers miss, and a claim letter you can copy straight from your phone.
One hotel night like Neal’s costs more than a year of paid membership. Paid subscribers also sit up front with me, with direct access to ask me anything when it happens to you.
