Dear Mary | 24 May 2008

Q. I treated four friends to a trip to the Far East. On the way back there was a
cock-up at the airport with an overbooked plane and our party had to be put up for the night in a (magnificent) hotel. As a stickler for standards I wrote to the airline to complain and was quite satisfied to receive flight vouchers for £500 in compensation. I was amazed when one of my guests boasted to me later that he had followed my lead and that he too had received £500 in flight vouchers. Do you agree, Mary, that it was incumbent on my guest to pass these vouchers on to me? It was no great hardship for him to spend the night in a five-star hotel — he was unemployed at the time. And he would not have been on the flight at all had it not been for my largesse.