Old rule still holds magic for stranded air travelers — chicagotribune.com
It served as a secret handshake, of sorts, between airlines and passengers for decades.Travelers whose flights were delayed, or who simply were running late, would sidle up to ticket counters and whisper, “Rule 240 me.” And the airline workers usually would oblige, putting them on the next flight to their destination, even if it were on a rival carrier.
The days of Rule 240 as an official component of the era of regulated air travel are long gone. But in this summer of endless delays, steamed passengers and overcrowded planes, a little bit of the magic behind that phrase has reappeared, with savvy travelers invoking their rights as customers to demand special treatment.
As noted farther down in the article, Rule 240 is still invoked by travel agencies who’re attempting to intervene on their passengers’ behalf when something goes wrong mid-trip, or also when airlines carry out major schedule changes that mess up itineraries enough that the passenger has to be rebooked. They commonly notify the agencies via an internal queueing system, which links carriers’ reservation systems to that used by the individual agencies. I’ve used this magic phrase many times myself and have even been advised by airline customer service reps to put it in the “endorsement” field of the new ticket before reissuing (we sometimes have access to a special desk, depending on the relationship between our major cliend or our company and the airline).
I started out as a travel agent in 1985, a few years after deregulation, but Rule 240 has generally been honored whenever something causes a cancellation. There’s another one that’s weather-related: Rule 260, which governs whether change fees can be waived due to a major storm that’s about to hit, or whether nonrefundable fares can actually be refunded because the flights were all grounded. We’re sometimes asked to add a comment invoking Rule 260 to all the affected airline reservations (PNRs, or Passenger Name Records) in a way that sends a message to the airline and puts the record on a working queue somewhere. Then we batch submit all the electronic ticket numbers (or paper tickets, if there are any) for refund direct with the airline, rather than through the central clearinghouse agency, the Airline Reporting Corporation. We had to do this with a couple of “major” winter storms last year, and most memorably when 9/11 happened and there were thousands and thousands of flights cancelled for several days.
