Help! A Broken Toilet Grounded My Plane, and the Airline Wont Cover a Hotel.
Dear Tripped Up,On May 30, my wife and I were scheduled to take Turkish Airlines’ evening flight from Denver to Istanbul.The flight was delayed several hours because of what we were told was a mechanical problem.
We boarded the aircraft at around 11:30 p.m., taxied to the runway and then returned to the gate.The flight was finally canceled at around 1 a.m.
Gate agents advised us that no hotel vouchers were available and that we should find hotels and submit our receipts to the airline.We stayed at the airport Westin, paying $512, including taxes and breakfast, and flew out the next day.
We heard — and later read in The Denver Post — that the cancellation had been caused by an overflowing lavatory.But the airline sent us a message attributing the disruption to “force majeure,” which to me means an earthquake or a war or something similar.
I called the airline and was told to submit my hotel receipts online, which I did twice, but got no response.Turkish Airlines’ customer service plan says the carrier pays for hotels only if the reason for the cancellation was under its control.
Is Turkish evading responsibility with this “force majeure” argument? Can you help? Neal, Broomfield, Colo.Dear Neal,How an airline describes the cause of a cancellation can directly affect whether it will cover passengers’ lodging, transportation and meals.For mechanical issues, the answer is often yes; for weather or air-traffic issues, it’s almost always no.U.S.
regulations define those categories, but they do not require airlines to pay for stranded passengers’ expenses.Nevertheless, all the major U.S.
carriers except Frontier explicitly promise hotel stays in their customer service plans if the reason for the disruption is under their control.The Turkish Airlines policy for U.S.
flights is a bit looser — but the airline usually offers lodging for controllable disruptions.For the last couple of years, I’ve kept a file of emails from travelers who suspecte...