Help! A Broken Toilet Grounded My Plane, and the Airline Won’t Cover a Hotel.

Résumé détaillé

Turkish Airlines tried to wiggle out of paying for a passenger’s $512 overnight stay after a stomach-churning malfunction forced it to cancel a flight in Denver.

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.

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 suspected, as you do, that a carrier had weaseled its way out of covering passengers’ expenses by misrepresenting what happened.

I had avoided the ever-expanding file because I knew that proving the precise cause of any one incident was most likely a fool’s errand. Disruptions can have multiple causes, and the U.S. Department of Transportation gives the airlines flexibility in determining the main one. For example, if a mechanical problem causes a delay, then a storm moves in and shuts down the airport, airlines can blame the weather.

But the evidence…

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