"Really? Are you to blame if your regularly-serviced car develops a technical fault?"
My car has a warranty for life which provides a get you to your destination guarantee irresepective of what goes wrong, as long as it has been correctly serviced by an approved dealer.
Technical fault occurrence is built into business plans. There is much talk on these fora about the pros and cons of newer versus older aircraft for reliability versus safety. The disruption that goes along with the potential lower reliability of older aircraft can be quite clearly seen in the business planning of different carriers. How often is there a comment on Pprune that "at least Jet2 do their best to get you there, rather than just cancelling the flight"
Even if a carrier choses do nothing to assist passengers as a result of a technical issue, there are still significant internal costs in dealing with it, and therefore any business plan will sensibly include a provision for disruption costs. The issue has been whether a carrier has chosen whether or not to include customer care in that provision. In the case of my car, the manufacturer has decided to include some of my disruption costs in their costs when their product fails.
Last edited by Hipennine; 24th Oct 2012 at 16:17.