Making the Case for Airline Compassion Fares: The Serial Organization of Problem Narratives During a Family Crisis

Abstract

Faced with the need to make last minute and thus unexpected travel plans to visit his dying mother, a son searches for discounted and timely airline reservations. His search for compassion fares involves a series of interactions with family members before and after calls to major airlines. We identify specific devices for delicately initiating phone openings with airline agents, making a persuasive case for urgent and affordable assistance and soliciting special understandings regarding the legitimacy of his troubling circumstances. Attention is drawn to the serial organization and cumulative impact of calls over time, one advantage of working with longitudinal data. It is shown how an initial call with the son's mom and dad forms the basis for subsequent problem narratives, the contingent enactment of narratives as progressively built for agents, and a retrospective summary to an aunt whose advice about compassion fares was misinformed. Numerous ironies are identified: unavoidable disjunctures between institutional representatives and lay persons, how the son streamlines his actions as an upshot of learning about the airline system, and ways predictions about imminent death give rise to interactional trajectories susceptible to modification and change.