I'm surprised we haven't seen more companies abuse the credit reporting system like this. Recourse is painful for the customer, and I imagine a non-trivial number of them will just pay off the debt. I'm guessing with the gutting of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau we'll see a rise in these type of practices.
There is no debt, though. You can't charge people extra for not showing up at a flight. A non-flying passenger demonstrably makes a resource available: they can sell the seat to someone else. Even if they don't, it's less weight: less fuel burned.
The idea that the passenger should have paid more to get off at that intermediate airport is purely a fabricated entitlement.
If they underlying hypothesis behind this entitlement is that "all people should pay the same for the same flight", it is pure hypocrisy, because the airline industry is responsible for, and profits from the whole situation that people in adjacent seats may have paid wildly different prices.
If they want people not to game the system, they have to remove the game from the system. But that game largely benefits them, so they don't. You can't have it both ways: create a game-like system, and not have people some people play it some of the time.
No-one's disputing that. The parent post is supposing that because taking this to court and proving that United violated the law is expensive (in both money and more importantly effort), a large enough percentage of people will not do it.
It's yet another example of the mere involvement of the legal system being used as a deterrent against individuals, regardless of who's in the right.
Falsely damaging someone's reputation in writing is libel. I think if more companies abused the credit rating system, they and the credit bureaus would see a lot more libel claims.
It would even make sense to mechanize these libel claims via a bunch of templates, sort of like how airhelp.com works.
