If you bought a tour or vacation through a tour packager and you had a harrowing experience, such as a crash-landing and you survived, you may soon be entitled to a refund of your entire package price.
Jeffrey White reports that Die Zeit, a German newspaper, says that Germany’s Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, ruled that airline passengers whose airplane crashed, or came close enough to crashing, on their return trip from a vacation, are entitled to a refund of the entire cost of the trip. The Court reasoned that the experience may have caused undue fear and stress, thus “ruining the relaxation won on said vacation.”
A court in Duisburg must now decide whether this has any bearing on a case that is before them involving a German couple who were returning from a vacation in Turkey. According to the couple, the plane’s door almost opened and pieces of the ceiling came down. The plane was forced to do a corkscrew landing in Istanbul.
Alltours, the packager that the couple bought the tour from, refunded them $430, but the couple sued for the entire amount of the package. Their reasoning is that “they lost all the peace and rest they’d built up during their two weeks by the pool.”
So now the Duisburg court must decide whether the couple “really thought they were going to die, which could bring the matter in line with the high court’s ruling.”
The ruling will be watched carefully as this may affect tour packagers around the world.
Back home in the USA, packagers are watching this European case carefully since lawsuits in America are are considered the norm not the exception. However, many statistics don’t correlate with the sue-happy picture of Americans.
