Originally Posted by
MickG0105
Not when the relationship between the airline and the passenger is bound by a Contract of Carriage, they don't. Passengers have rights under the Contract of Carriage and those rights typically increase as certain threshold events - booking, payment, ticketing, check-in and boarding - are met. After check-in but before boarding United Airlines, by virtue of Rule 25 of the Contract of Carriage, have the right to deny boarding on an involuntary basis to passengers in cases of Overbooked Flights. However, once United accept boarding passes and allow passengers to board the flight their right to deny boarding on an involuntary basis is extinguished.
So, when United realised that they needed to deplane four passengers in order to get four of their own staff on board, they had no right under their own Contract of Carriage to do so on a involuntary basis. Rule 21 of the Contract of Carriage deals with Refusal of Transport and lists 8 very specific criteria by which United can refuse to carry a passenger; none of those criteria applied in this instance.
When the United Airlines ground staff member decided he was going to arbitrarily deplane four passengers on an involuntary basis he had no legal right to do so; he was breaching the Contract of Carriage. His direction to the passenger to get off the plane was both unreasonable and unlawful and the passenger was entirely within his rights to ignore the direction.
News to me. I was always told that the airline ticket was an 'invitation to travel' and that operational requirements could sometimes override that. Look, I have no truck with what they did and certainly no defense of the way it was done. In my experience many so-called 'law enforcement' personnel are far too trigger happy and officious in that country. They talk about freedom and all that but if any of our police in Australia acted the way their police are reported to every day there would be monumental outcry.
I agree there probably has to be a 'meeting of minds' and that boarding consummates the 'contract' but thought there were ample ways the airline can get out of this with compensation. If that's different, then it's news to me. I don't think airlines should 'assume' seats of passengers unless every other option has been explored first with reasonable regard for the timeframes but saying that you simply cannot remove someone... the conditions of carriage do not identify any circumstance when a pax boards an aircraft and their assigned seat is found to be unserviceable and they are therefore offloaded - but this does happen. I just think there are some grey areas here... but we'll wait and see what happens because the pax is going to file suit against the airline I understand.