Airline compensation

[divajane]

What is standard these days as far as compensation from airlines? DH and I were traveling home from vacation today, and the plane had an electrical fire about 30 min into the 1.5 hr flight. We made an emergency landing, and were stuck in a small airport for 3 hours. At the end of the three hours, the airline rep offered us a meal voucher and an 8 hour bus ride to get home, no other options. Is this typical, or am I justified in feeling like they should offer more? Because of the delays we will have to buy an additional meal (not comped), and go to work tomorrow on about 4 hrs of sleep (we will get home approx 11 hours later than scheduled). Should I complain/ask for more? If so, what is the best way to get results?

[Deleted]

When I've had a flight cancelled like that, the airline always comps a hotel room for the night and then a flight out the next morning as well as meals in between there. I'm not sure where you really go from here if you've already accepted the comp they offered and are on a bus heading home.

[cricketwife]

I'm not sure that they owe you much more given the circumstances. Particularly if you're in a small airport, I'm not sure how much more they can do, unless you want to ask for a hotel and a flight out tomorrow. You could ask for an additional meal voucher and purchase something for the bus ride. It does suck, and I'd definitely feel like I wanted more, but you had an emergency landing, an 11 hour delay is actually not that bad in this case.

[divajane]

Thanks for the replies, I sort of figured we weren't going to get anything else, but I might try twitter just to see what happens. To answer the question about location, we were headed from Chicago to manhattan, ks. The plane landed in moline, Illinois, which is an 8 hour bus ride from manhattan, if you drive straight through.

[aurora]

I've found that airlines will do anything in their power to avoid giving good customer service. You can always ask for more, but my guess is that you won't get much better than maybe another meal voucher and an airline voucher you'll never want to use because you want to boycott the company.