US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

I've had four overnight delays on three transatlantic trips this year. Fortunately, EU passenger compensation rules applied to three of them; the airline must pay each delayed passenger 600€ or convince them to take a more compelling non-cash offer.

I'm not for heavily regulating non-safety details of how most industries do business, but I do think it's fair to demand the true price up front and compensation when the airline doesn't provide the service it sold for reasons within its control.

There was a year I made more money from flying than I spent, because I kept flying ryanair or easyjet and I kept getting massive delays (one was a 20h delay, in which I spent the night at the airport squatting some of the couches in a cafe in the terminal, because small delays kept being slowly pushed on us, and we also spent 2h waiting in the final plane for it to take off, no A/C and they refused to give us water threatening to call the cops on us if we did get water bottles ourselves, great experience!)

Could you share more context on the water bottle thing? That makes no sense to me.

I interpreted it as they were stuck on the tarmac for a long time. People were getting dehydrated and asked for water. The FA’s refused to serve drinks on the tarmac. Passengers said “fuck it this is a health issue I’ll just get it from the galley myself”. The FA’s threatened that anyone who did that would be arrested.

Passengers only options were to either deal with the dehydration or declare an actual emergency and get official medical transport off of the plane to an ER and deal with whatever bills/consequences that might generate.