A reader in Northern California was looking forward to
her birthday. Her daughter had invited her and a lifelong friend to celebrate
the event in a vacation home the daughter owned in Costa Rica.
Since the reader's daughter rents out the Costa Rica
house to others, she blocked out the specific time that her mother and her
friend would be visiting. The reader and her friend purchased their airline
tickets well in advance. Her daughter made arrangements so the two of them
could go on several excursions and take a trip to the capital city of San Jose.
The planning continued and the anticipation grew.
But then, the reader's friend received disturbing news
from her granddaughter. A friend of the granddaughter had apparently gone to
Costa Rica, gotten sick, and subsequently died.
The reader still didn't see any reason that that should
alter their travel plans. But, she writes that her friend "panicked and
canceled her participation."
When the reader's daughter learned that her mother's
friend was no longer planning to travel to Costa Rica, the daughter canceled
the time she had blocked out for them in her vacation house. The reader says
her daughter did this because the lifelong friend's "presence was more or
less a birthday gift for me."
Now, the reader is faced with what she sees as a problem.
Since her daughter canceled the trip and she has nowhere to stay, there's not
much sense in keeping her flight to Costa Rica or the excursion bookings her
daughter had made.
She writes that her friend "has been very
hostile" since she decided to cancel the trip. The reader's assessment is
that her friend's hostility "is the only way she can deal with her
guilt."
"Should my friend be responsible for our
cancellation fees?" the reader asks.
The reader's friend's behavior might have as much to do
with sharing her granddaughter's grief over the loss of a friend as it does
with guilt over bailing out on the Costa Rica birthday trip. Still, the friend
should be responsible for any cancellation fees she incurred for her portion of
the trip.
It doesn't seem right to hold the friend responsible for
the reader's cancellation fees any more than it does to hold the reader's
daughter responsible since she after all is the one who decided not to keep the
Costa Rica house available for the appointed time.
The reader may portray her friend's response to news of
her granddaughter's friend's death as "panicked," but if that event
caused her to rethink her desire to make the trip then it's her prerogative to
do so, regardless of how inconvenient it makes things.
The right thing is for each of them to pay for their own
expenses incurred as a result of the decision not to go to Costa Rica, just as
they would have paid their own expenses had they gone.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School.
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
(c) 2013 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNECONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
1 comment:
Jeffrey,
The question really is whether your reader -ought- to attempt to collect the cancellation fees from her friend who cancelled. Technically her friend -might- be liable for cancellation fees that were unavoidable after she cancelled but your reader would be either relying on her friend's goodwill to pay voluntarily or otherwise dragging her into small claims court. The latter may recoup a few funds but at the complete expense of the friendship. The former might work but also might further alienate an already hostile friend. Better probably to learn a lesson that (1) when booking the trip, you bore the risk of cancellation and (2) Its probably good not to book trips with this friend in the future.
William Jacobson
Anaheim, CA
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