Should 'Right' be 'Whatever We Can Get Away With'?

A friend of mine booked her summer holiday with Thomas Cook way back before Christmas ('07), paid £40 extra per head for a daytime flight, paid her deposit, and thought nothing more of it (if you're an American reader, simply double the £ figure to make it the $ equivalent).
Then, a couple of days ago, she received a missive from said Thomas Cook informing her that they had rebooked her on a later flight, travelling over- night. No explanation, no apology, no return of daytime flight surcharge.
When she phoned them and demanded the return of the surcharge for booking a daytime flight she was told this was non-refundable; then, when she said she'd cancel and book with another operator, she was told she'd forfeit her deposit. That too was non-refundable.
Eventually, after much wrangling, Thomas Cook offered her a paltry £50 compensation for a party of 5 - when she had originally paid £40 per head for a daytime flight.
Given that she was now already £150 down on the deal, and had lost almost a day of her precious and very expensive holiday due to the decision of the tour operator (or airline), this kind of business practice hardly inspires confidence that the operators have their customers' best interests at heart.
Down on our little allotment Nosher and I have certain questions about this kind of business practice. It appears to be legal - or at least permitted by the powers that be - but does that make it right?
My friend thought she was entering into a mutually binding contract with Thomas Cook, only to find out later that it was binding on her but not on them. How can this be considered fair? Why should this be allowed in the first place?
Of course it's easy to surmise what had actually happened, even to a couple of stay-at-home allotment gardeners.
The routine practice in the airline and tour industries is to over-book aircraft seats on the basis that some passengers will not turn up. If too many turn up on the day, some have to be 'bumped' onto a later flight, usually with no hint of compensation for their holiday being deliberately shortened by the airline.
But, since my friend's holiday was booked for the summer, still many weeks away, the issue of too many passengers turning up does not apply.
Clearly too many seats had been booked - but someone, somewhere in the chain of commercial contracts involved decided that, even this early on, my friend and her party should forfeit her daytime flight in favour of another passenger group, who had presumably paid the same £40 per head surcharge for a daytime flight.
So, the same contract was made with each group, but was honoured in the case of only one. If one factors in the practice of over-booking, it means the operators are taking people's money knowing that, in some cases at least, some of these people have no chance at all of getting a daytime flight, but will nonetheless be charged a non-refundable surcharge for one. In almost any other industry this would be called fraud, or at least highly questionable business practice. So why are airline and tour operators allowed to get away with it?
Well, the straightforward answer is that under international treaties airlines and tour operators are allowed to do this kind of thing - but the treaties themselves are decades old and were negotiated in the days when national governments believed the airline business needed a boost in order to stimulate economic growth, and overbooking and surcharges were then unheard of. In fact, the extent of any financial or legal liability, or moral commitment, of airline and tour operators to their customers is so strictly limited in law as to be laughable.
Many years ago - the last time I flew, in fact - I was on a Sabena Airbus on the tarmac at Boston, Mass., when the pilot announced that the airline had not yet faxed through the cargo manifest from their European HQ, and therefore the airport authorities were holding up the flight. We sat on the tarmac for over two hours, and the pilot even announced over the PA system that he thought this was inexcusable on the part of his own airline! We arrived in Brussels four hours late, missed our connection to Bristol, and eventually arrived at Bristol Airport 8 hours later than scheduled, with all our homeward travel arrangements in chaos. The delay was entirely the airline's fault, but their only legal liability was to provide us with a meal voucher whilst we waited for four hours at Brussels Airport.
After much correspondence with the senior management of Sabena I eventually received some financial compensation for their failure, but they were obstructive every step of the way. A couple of years later Sabena went bust. I did not shed a tear - they deserved to go bust.
So now I don't fly anywhere - I detest being treated little better than cattle, I object to being compelled to enter into legal agreements that are binding upon only one party - the more powerful already - and I have moral objections at being forced to live under a system of law that decides on our behalf that 'right' is what ever the rich and powerful can get away with. No wonder so many ordinary people now take the view the 'right' is 'whatever we can get away with'.
The roots of this issue lie far back in history. Legal systems are not, and have never been, about securing justice for the little people, but about ensuring that the rich and powerful get their own way and can justify it on legal and (usually spurious) moral grounds - even if that sometimes means making small concessions to the little people to get their co-operation and compliance.
To see the truth of this you only have to look back through history to learn that all the concessions made to the little people have been obtained after much sacrifice and pain on their part, and only because they had managed to secure a negotiating position in which expedience was the least worst option for their opponents.
These days, getting justice for your cause usually depends upon how clever (and expensive) your lawyers are. The little people - the ordinary people who cannot afford clever, expensive lawyers - have little chance of obtaining justice through the courts. That might sound cynical, but it's what many people believe - and is how the legal system actually operates in the majority of cases. And when it's not about that, it rests on the subjective whims of judge and jury (although the former will obviously rely on reams of case-law to back up any decision - obscured by legal jargon and precedents that stretch far back into the mists of time and do not necessarily reflect the realities under which us ordinary people have to live nowadays).
And at the root of all legal determinations lies the interpretation of the law, which, being framed in words, is itself subject to judgements as to what those words mean or imply. And, as no one should be surprised, it's those with power and money who usually hold the key influence when it comes to deciding what their words should mean for the rest of us, and, if they've got clever and expensive lawyers, the chances are they'll get judges and juries to agree with them.
So, my best mate Nosher and me now restrict our exposure to such sharp practices as much as we can - and that means we don't fly anywhere. We
toil on our little allotment plots happy in the knowledge that we are not going to be ripped off by tour operators or airlines - although the taxes that we pay are already higher than they need be due to airlines not paying any fuel duty on the kerosene they use in their jet engines.
And, of course, we're being fashionably green.
More from overthegardenfence soon.