[anApple]

So why did you miss the plane? Was it your fault or the airlines?

If it was your fault, what do you expect to happen? If you travel by TGV in France and miss your train, your place is also gone and you have to buy a new ticket.

[goatforce5]

I once overslept and missed my NYC -> Australia flight on a dirt cheap lowest-of-the-low economy Qantas ticket. Called them up, fearing the worst, and think I was going to have to pay crazy sums to fly out the next day by buying a last minute ticket.

Because I was calling at a weird hour, my call got routed to Qantas in Australia. Guy answers, I tell him in a panic about my situation and he's like "Yeah, no worries mate. Changed your ticket to tomorrow. How's New York? OMG! Have you seen the Statue of Liberty?!" Ha!

[davidw]

We expected to have to pay something to fix the situation because it was "our fault" (there was a big accident and an hour long wait on the autobahn), but we also expected them to work with us a bit to try and fix things in some way. We did, after all, still have return tickets that we wanted to use, rather than buying a complete new round trip. Indeed, we finally did get a hold of someone on the phone and they managed to patch things up with roughly 100$ each, which wasn't that bad, all things considered, and seemed 'fair' to us. The problem was that they should have done that at the beginning (in other words, the person working at the terminal) rather than basically just telling us to get lost.

The difference really came down to how we were treated - a little bit of sympathy and trying to work with someone goes a long way to take the sting out of a bad situation.