Vacation refunds: German high court ruling puts packagers on the hook for plane crashes, emergency landings

Now here is one court ruling that pretty much any traveler could get behind.

According to the German news weekly Die Zeit, Germany's Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, recently ruled that airline passengers traveling home from a holiday are entitled to a full refund of the cost of their trip if their plane crashes or comes close enough to crashing to have caused passengers fear and stress -- thus ruining the relaxation won on said vacation.

Obviously if a plane crashes, more than likely there won't be many refunds to hand out. But it's the latter condition that is interesting here.

I'm not talking a refund of airfare. I'm talking a refund of everything that was spent on the holiday. Many German tourists book vacations through packages that include airfare, so this means they'd be entitled to a refund of the entire package.

Now, a court in the town of Duisburg must decide whether this ruling from the high court has any bearing on a case it is currently hearing involving a German couple whose plane home from Turkey had to make an emergency landing in Istanbul three years ago.

The couple's plane malfunctioned shortly after taking off from Antalya. The couple says the plane's door almost opened, pieces of the cabin's ceiling starting coming down and the plane had to do a corkscrew landing in Istanbul.

The couple was on a two week Turkish vacation -- some say Turkey is Germany's 17th state -- from a German packager called Alltours.

Alltours gave the couple around $430 for the delay they suffered. The couple sued for their entire package to be refunded, saying they lost all the peace and rest they'd built up during their two weeks by the pool.

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.

But there are a few questions that go unanswered in the article, including why the high court bothered to rule on this in the first place. Had another lawsuit like this reached it? And also, isn't this a stupid ruling? I mean, what if the packager was from the U.S. or U.K.? Can a German court compel a foreign company to pay up?

What if you weren't on a package, and didn't keep receipts?

However, it's a nice thought, isn't it? Imagine coming home from the Caribbean or Disney or what have you, hitting unusually bad turbulence, maybe even making an emergency landing of sufficient drama and getting the cost of your vacation refunded because you now feel, you tell people, so frazzled it's like you never went on vacation at all!

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