United Airlines says their motto is “good leads the way” but does it? At least if the airline promises you they’ll reimburse you for a hotel room after an overnight delay – you shell out for the room, and then they say their fingers were crossed – you probably don’t think so.
@united employee promises refund in writing but Polaris customer with 27 flight this year has to pay the price because employee apparently lied. Won’t issue refund and rectify the mistake even after admitting to it. What is this?#unitedAIRLINES @Jordan_Bykowsky@bcstoller_ual pic.twitter.com/8IykIDTJNF
— ULA customer! (@singh_snap) July 21, 2025
Airlines will generally cover your hotel costs when you’re stuck somewhere overnight and it’s their fault – if your plane goes mechanical, or they didn’t have crew avaialable are two usual reasons for this.
- They make no promises about the quality of the room you’ll get. It’s often quite bad! That’s why I recommend paying attention to which credit card you use to purchase your tickets, as your card may offer trip delay coverage that can pay out usually up to $500 for lodging, meals, and transportation back and forth to the airport.
- And they’re not going to cover your costs when the reason for the long delay or cancellation is outside of their control, such as air traffic control problems or bad weather. And they’ll call anything they possibly can weather, even when it’s clear skies where you’re at, where you’re going, and enroute between the two cities. If there was weather where your crew or plane were coming from, that’s weather and they consider themselves off the hook.
It seems to me, though, that:
- the average customer doesn’t understand when an airline is responsible for their hotel, and when they’re not.
- sometimes an airline will go above and beyond the minimum they’re required to offer
- passengers rely on the airline to tell them how a situation will be handled.
- the airline should stand behind what their agents put in writing – the customer should be entitled to rely on this.
I recently wrote about Delta mistakenly telling a woman she’d receive reimbursement for a rental car after a flight diversion for weather enroute to see her dying father for the last time. The airline stood behind the agent’s claim after I contacted them (they first denied the claim).
I was told unequivocally, “Delta does not want our customers to experience being told one thing and then find out later it’s not true in any circumstance.”
However I covered a similar situation where American said they’d cover a hotel room after cancelling a flight but they refused to pay.
Apparently United is more like American here – no matter how much CEO Scott Kirby continues to compare his airline to Delta.
The solution is clear: We need actual comprehensive air passenger rights legislation in the United States, akin to Canada’s APPR and the EU/UK 261, so that there is defined compensation schemes when the airline is at fault for significant delays and cancellations. This is the hill I die on. We cannot rely on big companies to ‘do the right thing.’ We deserve better.
IMHO if you can afford to travel you should be able to afford a hotel room and meals if things go bad instead of looking for someone else to foot the bill. Just seems cheap and petty. Personally I look out for myself and don’t look for a handout. Sad so many are always looking for someone else to take care of them
@AC — Sadly, you’re leaving money on the table, and cheering for others to be screwed, too.
We passengers often pay a premium for specific flights on particular dates and times, class of service, etc. When those companies don’t deliver, we lose; and, if they pay no penalty for breaching that ‘contract,’ the incentive is for airlines to ‘give up,’ cancel, refund (partially, ideally force expiring ‘credits’ onto people).
Your regurgitating of pro-corporate propaganda (‘handouts’) is designed to maintain a status quo where the average consumer is basically powerless in these circumstances. For the rest of us, please resist that urge to carry water for the powerful and the wealthy. Those folks care nothing about you or I.
@AC, check your privilege. You received a shitton of handouts since the moment you were born. Not all travel is for leisure and even if so there is nothing wrong with travel on a budget as it is a completely fair expectation for the airline to provide meals and hotel rooms in certain cases.
It’s incredible you made it to retirement age such a bitter and cynical man with no virtue or force of moral character. Instead on a beautiful Saturday morning you spew your ignorance and plaster your unawareness of self for the entire internet to see.
Ultimately I pity you
@AC:
“Personally I look out for myself and don’t look for a handout. Sad so many are always looking for someone else to take care of them”
Customers who expect businesses to honour the promises they made are not looking for a handout.
Even determining whether the airlines should or should not be required to compensate in each situation is about defining unclear property rights between two parties in the presence of incomplete and asymmetric information, à la Coase, not handouts.
Not as wealthy as many of you but I’m just as mad at losing $20 unnecessarily as I was when I was a kid.
When the best recourse (versus dealing with a claims court or DOT complaint) is sending the receipts to Gary and hoping he intervenes/posts about it, there’s a problem. So yeah, something fundamentally needs to change.
@L737 — When it really comes down to it, we’re all just that ‘kid’ who’s mad to lose $20. Some react by attempting solutions, trying to prevent that loss in the future for themselves and others. While others attempt to blame that kid for being ‘weak’ or ‘deserving it.’ It’s the ole ‘build up’ vs. ‘punch down’ dichotomy. Or the ‘pulling the ladder up behind them’ thing.
Even with better protections and actual reimbursements (eventually), in the moment, when these inconveniences inevitably occur, we as passengers do ultimately have to take some personal responsibility, look out for ourselves, many times to book our own hotels, maybe also to book alternative flights with a different carrier, and often to pay out of pocket (sometimes hundreds or thousands of extra dollars), especially if we want to actually arrive at our destinations within a reasonable time (to make that meeting, catch that cruise, etc.), and/or if we want a better nights sleep (think three-star hotel, not one-star hotel), when stranded in an airport overnight because an airline couldn’t properly handle staffing or maintenance issues.
It sounds like this would be easy in small claims court as long as everything is documented.
If a reimbursement was promised by an agent of the business and the customer relied on that: That’s a contract. I don’t know where the law went wrong in our poor application of it but let’s not overcomplicate. and why in the world from a brand perspective you’d risk lifetime customer value, or risk and goodwill in a foolish attempt to optimize a few costs. Train the agents better, empower them, and write off any mistakes. Don’t make them appeal turn them into forever customers.
Conclusion: Delta good, UA and AA bad.
@jns — Have you (or anyone here) actually gone through that effort (like, attempting small claims court within the context of reimbursement claims against airlines)?
Nothing in court is ‘easy,’ but it is often worthwhile. The US DOT promotes that ‘solution’ on its ‘Air Travelers: Tell It to the Judge’ webpage. Of course, start by directly making your claim with the airline, then attempt credit card disputes, DOT complaints, etc., but when all that fails, go for it.
Ultimately, if you are ‘in the right,’ and have the time/resources/passion, please do. Even if you fail, or only partially recover, we ‘win’ in the aggregate, because these businesses begin to treat consumers better when they know they will be challenged for mistreating us.
When we ‘give up’ without even trying, or ‘blame ourselves’ (like @AC was suggesting), you’re telling the airlines, ‘please, Daddy, hit me harder.’
@Kirk — You’re gonna make @Tim Dunn’s day.
I have taken a former employer to small claims court in a disagreement over what I was owed upon termination. It was a relatively simple process. I claimed everything I thought I possibly could. My former employer held the line at what they had given me. My arguments were good enough that the judge drew a line in the middle and I got what I thought was a fair settlement. Of course, if I had failed to try to claim as much as I did, the settlement would not have been as fair to me. I have also fought traffic tickets in court and won some of them. No lawyers involved. Yes, you sometimes have to take off of work, but sometimes you have to try to get a settlement that is the correct one. I suppose you could say that sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you.
@jns — Well done! This is the way. We gotta fight back if we want any hope of a better outcome. Thank you for sharing those stories here.
Filing Fees in Small Claims Courts are usually more than the claim. In Dallas for a Small Claims Suit, filing fee is $134. Having a Defendant Served with the lawsuit (personal service is almost always required) is $80. If you want a Jury, $22 more. You’ll need to Subpoena Witnesses, that’s $84 per.
@JNS – different issues. Airlines have certain protections under Federal law. Also, no company is bound by promises made by unauthorized persons. Sorry for you all that think that isn’t “fair” or “right” but it is correct.
Finally for those giving me a hard time because I believe you shouldn’t look for a handout, is it really that important to get a $10-$15 meal voucher (that won’t even cover 1 beer in the airport) or a run down hotel room? I also take issue with Gary’s comment about airlines stretching weather as a cause of problems. Hopefully everyone on here understands (obviously not) that if the VERY FIRST flight of the day is impacted by weather that cascades through the entire schedule of that plane and is the cause for any subsequent missed connections. Sorry but those are simple facts. BTW, not bitter just responsible. Again IMHO if you can’t afford to travel and deal with the inevitable problems that may come up don’t go. BTW, I now am traveling totally on leisure and have no problem booking a hotel room (as I did last year when a flight from the West Coast was going to miss a connection at DFW). The money spent on the Grand Hyatt DFW was very well spent and we had a relatively seamless, stress free return flight (even with the disruption). Everyone would be better off if you simply looked out for your yourself as no one else is going to do that nor should they.
@AC — As to this specific incident, I’m pleased to see Gary and others ‘naming and shaming’ the companies that over-promise and under-deliver, or as some would call it ‘breach of contract.’ The sad reality is that it is often only because of public pressure that they ever ‘do the right thing,’ because our existing laws are so corporate-friendly, and so anti-consumer and anti-worker.
My earlier point remains, special interests (namely, lobbyists for the airlines) have all but killed anything meaningfully beneficial to passengers affected by the airlines’ mistakes. Our friends in Canada, UK, and EU at least have a baseline. Once sanity returns, Congress should legislate a fix here.
@1990
The solution. When reading this blog, I scratch my head and laugh
We retired six years ago and moved to Malta. And we travel like hell. And we quickly learned about EU 261. The first time used it was on flight(almost) with Finnair. I filed a claim while still on our cruise on the Norwegian coast. Our money was deposited in our bank account three days later. Still on vacation.
I will leave you with a quote from a UK member of Parliament.
When European citizens get mad, parliament becomes afraid of its citizens. In the U. S., the citizens are afraid of its government.
@AlanZ — Thank you.
You chose wisely. Malta is a beautiful, history-filled country. I enjoyed visiting Valletta and Gozo in 2017, even flew their airline from FCO-MLA.
I have very little good to say about Finnair, but I am glad to hear they paid-out for you. That is how EU261 (and equivalent regulation) should work.
When the airline has a staffing issue, or a maintenance problem, why is it that passengers are expected to ‘self-insure’ for the airlines’ failures… it’s absurd.
Even when we passengers purchase our own insurance, the terms are often stacked against us; read that fine-print, delays must affect at least ‘72 hours’ or ‘50% of your Trip’ in many policies; so, the typical 1-2 day delay isn’t good enough for ‘coverage’ in some cases.
As I’ve said before on here in other posts, folks are quick to threaten ‘higher airfare,’ yet, Ryanair still overs €20 fares, and EU261 has not bankrupt any airlines either.
Finally, because we don’t have an equivalent in the USA, if you originate here, connect in Europe, and fly onward to a final destination outside EU, even on an EU carrier, there are no easy protections, not even EU261.
So, imagine, single ticket, ATL-CDG-BKK on AF, and the CDG-BKK flight has a mechanical issue, canceled, (sorry, no luck, take the next available flight, which could be in 2 days), or a partial refund (because you already flew ATL-CDG), then pay top-dollar for a last-minute flight with a competitor, like Thai, to make it in-time for whatever you had planned.
Sure, because it’s an international flight, and both the USA and France signed onto the Montreal Convention, you can go to small claims, cite Article 19, and fight for reimbursement within the two year’s statute of limitations… but who honestly has the time, energy, resources for that ‘wild ride.’ And the caselaw is not ‘great’ either. So, that’s what the airlines count on, preventing protections, and convincing folks to give up.
One more time, thank you, and we deserve better (in the USA).