Air Canada held liable for its chatbot's wrong bereavement-fare advice

Background

A bereavement fare is a discounted airline ticket sold to people who have to travel because someone close to them has died. Airlines usually require passengers to apply for the discount in a particular way and at a particular time, and the rules differ from carrier to carrier.

Air Canada had a chatbot on its website that passengers could ask questions about fares and policies. In 2022 that chatbot told a passenger, Jake Moffatt, that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for the bereavement fare retroactively, after the trip^[1].

What happened

Moffatt booked the flight and later asked for the discount. Air Canada refused, saying the request needed to be submitted before the flight rather than afterwards^[1]. The advice the passenger had relied on, in other words, was the opposite of the airline's actual policy.

Moffatt brought the dispute to the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, a provincial body that handles small claims and similar disputes.

The argument and the ruling

Air Canada's defence attracted most of the attention. The airline argued before the tribunal that its chatbot was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions"^[1].

Tribunal member Christopher Rivers rejected that position. He ruled that it should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website, and that it makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot^[1]. The ruling found Air Canada liable for negligent misrepresentation — the legal wrong of giving inaccurate information carelessly, where the person receiving it relies on it and suffers a loss as a result^[2].

The tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay Moffatt CA$812.02 in damages and tribunal fees^[1]. Air Canada had earlier offered him a $200 goodwill coupon, and the tribunal ruled that the airline was not entitled to set that coupon off against the award^[2].

Why it matters

The decision was issued in mid-February 2024 and was reported as a landmark establishing that companies are responsible for what their chatbots say^[1][2].

Its significance comes from how ordinary the underlying situation is. Companies increasingly put chatbots in front of customers as a cheap first line of support, and those chatbots answer questions about prices, deadlines and rules. The tribunal's reasoning treats such an answer as a statement by the company, on the same footing as text written on a help page. A firm cannot escape responsibility for a wrong answer by describing the software that produced it as an independent actor. The case therefore turned a technical question — who speaks for a company when a model generates the reply — into a simple one about the company's own website.