Exactly.
.
When they couldn't get volunteers, they should have held an auction, raising the price until they found a buyer.  That would have accurately determined the actual financial indifference curves of the passengers.
.
The idea that a private commercial entity can arbitrarily and peremptorily invoke the state monopoly on the use of force without any kind of judicial oversight, as a matter of its own convenience, to deal with a private law breach of a purely commercial contract that it had itself created ...
.
... whoever established this policy should go to jail.  No amount of money damages is sufficient to send the proper message of deterrence in these cases.
.
Only substantial jail time will cure this problem.