>> The reason airlines charge such harsh penalties...
Scheduling and logistics is a perfectly good reason for having these expectations. Airlines have horrible margins (< 10%) in even good years, and fuel and staff isn't free. Planning is kind of a big deal in an industry like this, and you can't do that if everything is last minute.
>> Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?
He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse. Maybe 10%? Sure.20%? Pushing it, but I could see that in special circumstances. Once you're cancelling 5-6x more flights than you're actually going on, there's a problem.
Changing/cancelling a 2-day-old reservation 6 months out -- not "last minute" -- has a negligible cost. However, AA will still charge a non-elite customer $200. If you could prove that the majority of Mr. Rothstein's cancellations were made within a week, even a month, of the actual flight, perhaps I'd agree with you, but that data is not available to us, and his daughter inferred that many tickets were cancelled within a day or two.
You are using AA's chosen nomenclature against Mr. Rothstein. Was he truly "cancelling" or just changing the date/time/stopover most of these times (which AA would call a cancel/re-issue)? What about changing his seat at the gate -- the agent rips up the boarding pass and issues a new one. Is that considered a cancellation? If I was in court trying to amplify percentages to disparage someone, I'd probably say it was.
> He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse.
I just want to chime in here and point out that the exit clause in the contract required fraudulent usage. American was certainly getting royally screwed by the deal they made, and the pattern of Rothstein's reservations and cancellations was certainly not normal. But what took thousands of billable hours for lawyers to resolve seems to be specifically whether his behavior rose to the level of fraud.
Scheduling and logistics is a perfectly good reason for having these expectations. Airlines have horrible margins (< 10%) in even good years, and fuel and staff isn't free. Planning is kind of a big deal in an industry like this, and you can't do that if everything is last minute.
>> Why is that relevant when the pass is unlimited?
He cancelled 84% of flights. Eighty. Four. Percent. This is such an absurd number that I cannot see how else you can look at this other than abuse. Maybe 10%? Sure.20%? Pushing it, but I could see that in special circumstances. Once you're cancelling 5-6x more flights than you're actually going on, there's a problem.