DOT’s Tweaking of Traveler Protections

By Scott McCartney

The new airline customer-service rules issued Wednesday by the Department of Transportation may sound like a lot of change but really boil down to small modifications of existing rules and codifying some measures that airlines have already adopted.
Perhaps the most impactful change for travelers is including international airlines in the tarmac-delay rule. We’ve seen some serious delays on international airlines – passengers stuck onboard grounded planes for 10 hours or so. U.S. airlines – faced with huge fines if they didn’t act – have largely learned to avoid long onboard delays. Now foreign airlines will have to do more to make sure they have gates and contingency plans for dealing with travel disruptions. They are subject to fines if passengers are left onboard a delayed flight for more than four hours.
The new rule also expands the number of airports where it would be in effect. Previously flights that were stranded at small airports were exempt. Now smaller airports, including airports to which flights divert, are included for domestic and international airlines.
Travelers should have the choice – wait it out or give up, go home or get on another flight, if you can.
Perhaps the least impactful new rule is the one getting a lot of headline attention – forcing airlines to refund baggage fees if bags get lost. The key here is that fees don’t get refunded if bags are simply late. You only get your $25 back if the airline never delivers the bag to you, not if it didn’t get on your flight or got sent to San Diego instead of San Antonio.
It can take many weeks for an airline to officially declare a bag “lost,’’ never to be found, and many more to actually get compensated for your losses. You may be out several hundred or even several thousand dollars (never check valuables!) in clothing and belongings, and you face a torturous process of trying to prove the value of lost goods to an airline with receipts. Airlines depreciate the value of goods lost and unilaterally decide what to pay you. The $25 bag fee is the least of your worries by the time you get through with the airline.
Bumping up compensation to involuntarily bumped passengers should further curb airline overbooking and make travel more reliable. It may also sweeten the offers airlines make to get volunteers to give up their seats.
The fee disclosure regulations probably won’t have much impact, however. By now, most travelers know most airlines charge baggage fees. Southwest Airlines advertising probably does more to educate the public on that than any regulation. Now airlines will have to tell you clearly that there may be additional fees like baggage, and make it easier to find the fees.
It can be difficult to click around an airline Web site to find actual baggage charges, often buried in sections with baggage rules. A clear menu would be preferable – if you want fries with your hamburger, the price of fries is on the same menu. Imagine if a restaurant just posted a notice that fries were an additional fee and you had to go somewhere else to find the actual price.
The DOT didn’t require airlines to include their customer-service promises in the legal contract of tickets, called the “contract of carriage.’’ That would have given travelers a way to take airlines to court when they didn’t live up to their promises.
The new rules do require airlines to let consumers either hold a reservation for 24 hours without a fare change or get a full refund within 24 hours. That’s actually something most airlines already do – most big carriers pledged to do that 10 years ago when they pre-empted passenger-rights legislation in Congress by voluntarily offering customer service protections.
It’s unfortunate the airline industry doesn’t seem to be able to step up on its own and treat customers more fairly, straighten out its service problems and be more open about its pricing. The DOT is trying to protect passengers, and airlines do respond when pushed by the government. Perhaps if the industry had more leadership and was more proactive instead of reactive, it wouldn’t have to come to that.