So why, I hear you ask, did we not go straight to the airline for redress, revenge, compensation, satisfaction, or even explanation when we were dumped unceremoniously, yet again, at the wrong airport, several hundred kilometres short of our programmed and paid-for destination?
The answer is simple: we had already given away our rights of redress as air passengers at the Warsaw Convention of 1929. It told us so on our tickets. “Carriage hereunder,” it says in tiny print, way in the back of your ticket, “is subject to the
rules and limitations relating to liability established by the Warsaw Convention …”
Who cares if most of us, and in many cases our parents or even our countries, were not yet born in 1929? The fact is that we were all stitched up way back then through deals signed by a handful of imperial powers in the aftermath of the Great War and, generally speaking, we’re still jumping to attention or falling flat on our faces when those statutes tell us to do so.
The small print on your ticket is very important, but don’t expect your travel agent or airline representative to take you carefully through it, like they take you through the emergency drill before you take off. Most of us are so anxious to get to our destinations that few of us bother to read it.
And yet the implications of ignoring your rights once you have paid for your ticket are at least as grave as not knowing what to do in the case of that one-in-a-million chance of being on board when a rogue passenger or a maverick piece of metal on the ground sends your aircraft hurtling towards its destruction.
I have to confess that when I discovered that my little problem at the hands of Air Afrique (“There’s plenty of reason for rage”, January 19 to 25) was dealt with by the Warsaw Convention, I initially confused it with the Geneva Convention and erroneously assumed that I was covered by at least some small concession to human rights.
Not a bit of it. Whereas the Geneva Convention makes some feeble gestures in favour of the little people against the warmongering nation-states that control our destinies, the Warsaw Convention firmly protects the rights of freebooting business interests over those of the gullible consumer.
But what can you do? If you want to get from A to B, especially in Africa, there are very few options on how to do so, and therefore not a lot of haggling that can be done. As the Indian shopkeeper said, you take it or leave it. It’s a seller’s market, and the customer is always wrong.
The Warsaw Convention “applies to all international carriage of persons, luggage or goods performed by aircraft for reward”. (“You pay, I carry.”)
“For the purposes of this Convention,” it goes on, “the expression ‘international carriage’ means any [journey] in which, according to the contract made by the parties, the place of departure and the place of destination, whether or not there be a break in the carriage or a transhipment, are situated either within the territories of two High Contracting Parties, or within the territory of a single High Contracting Party, if there is an agreed stopping place within a territory subject to the sovereignty, suzerainty, mandate or authority of another Power, even though that Power is not a party to this Convention …”
Translated into English, this means that the rules of the convention apply to airlines that transport people or goods between two or more of the countries that were signatories to the convention – probably the major powers of the time, like Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States and so on – and also cover stopovers in other countries on the way. Outside that protective shield, presumably, the Warsaw rules do not apply.
The convention obliges the carrier to issue the passenger with a ticket that shows the points of departure and destination, as well as “the agreed stopping places, provided that the carrier may reserve the right to alter the stopping places in case of necessity, and that if he [the carrier] exercises that right, the alteration shall not have the effect of depriving the carriage of its international character …”
In other words, you can’t sue an airline for stranding you in the wrong country while you wait for the next available connection, which is what happened to me with Air Afrique and that fanciful and extremely expensive flight from Dakar to Douala.
One of the few concessions the convention makes to the rights of the passenger is contained in the clause that says: “The absence, irregularity or loss of the passenger ticket does not affect the existence or the validity of the contract of carriage, which shall nonetheless be subject to the rules of this Convention.”
But you try showing up at the check-in desk if you have innocently lost the ticket you have paid an arm and a leg for. Whatever proof you supply (receipts, credit card slips, cheque stubs) the airline official will tell you, with a cold stare worthy of a member of the Addams family, that you have been summarily bounced off the flight.
So even though no African country was present at the signing of the Warsaw Convention back in 1929, or even at its amendment at The Hague in 1955, it’s a free-for-all in the African skies, playing under Warsaw rules.
The continent has one of the most expensive air infrastructures – Johannesburg to Cape Town, for example, is said to be the most expensive internal route in the world – and yet it remains unreliable and exceptionally user-unfriendly.
You can’t even complain to your own government, because your own government is equally in awe of those Warsaw rules.
The bottom line, as the airlines will be delighted to tell you, is that once you step on board their flying machine, you’re on your own.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza