The Department of Transportation (DOT) is in the final throes of staffing a proposed rulemaking. Reports are surfacing that it is having trouble in bureaucracyland. That’s the home of dozens of lawyers and specialists who push and pull at the rulemaking and try to take into consideration thousands of pages of commentary about the DOT proposals.
Let’s hope that the core of consumer protections holds true for the three most important groundbreaking portions of the rulemaking — transparency of airline fees, inclusion of customer service plans in airline contracts of carriage and extension of many DOT rules to foreign carriers.
These three areas form the core of what are perhaps the most controversial portions of this far-reaching rulemaking. Here’s why this matters.
Airline price transparency — including airfares and all airline fees
More than 50 percent of all airline tickets are sold through travel agents. These travel agents range from corner agencies, to online travel agencies to corporate travel agencies. The airlines release official fees to no travel agents and they do not allow travel agents of any kind to sell ancillary fees.
This withholding of airline fees makes cost comparisons between airlines impossible. When the price of ancillary fees such as baggage, seat reservations, early boarding, pillows and blankets and WiFi can be the same as or more than basic advanced-purchased airfare, withholding this information from the buying process is clearly a deceptive and anti-consumer practice.
The proposed DOT rulemaking should mandate that airlines release their fees at the same time as they release airfares so that consumers can have available the full cost of travel through any channel that they purchase airline tickets as they plan their travel.
Including customer service plans in Airlines’ Contracts of Carriage
Most travelers don’t realize that they do not have the power of the courts behind them when faced with customer service issues. In an earlier article, I compared the current passenger legal rights to those of Medieval serfs.
Cases that have wound their way to the Supreme Court have preempted state courts from handling airline issues because the federal government’s authority trumps the state courts when it comes to airline issues. Plus, even when a case is brought against the airlines in federal court the only portion that can be legislated is the list of rights enumerated in the contract of carriage which all passengers implicitly sign when purchasing airline tickets.
With this in mind, the importance of having customer service promises included in the contract of carriage is obvious. Without being a part of the contract of carriage, these airline customer service plans and promises have absolutely no legal teeth and U.S. airline passengers are faced with their only remedy being a petition to DOT where some sort of mediation may be possible.
The proposed DOT rulemaking should mandate that customer service plans be made an integral part of the contract of carriage for all airlines.
Extension of tarmac-delay rules and other rules to foreign carriers
At first blush, the DOT proposal to regulate foreign carriers seems a regulation too far. However, when the new world of airline alliances and code-sharing comes into play, one can argue that there are no purely foreign carriers. There may be foreign-owned carriers and new hybrid joint ventures that have no real domicile, but almost every airliner, no matter what the paint job on the plane, departing from or arriving in the U.S.A. contains code-share passengers who are holding airline tickets with flight numbers clearly labeled AA, UA, DL, or US.
If the airline tickets are sold as though they are ticketed through a U.S. carrier then passenger protections must be the same as those afforded passengers flying on airliners with paint jobs that indicate American, Delta, United or USAirways.
In the case of the latest snowstorm madness in New York, the only airliners that were held on the tarmac for more than three hours were those of foreign carriers. Some of those passengers had to sit on the runway in the snow for up to 11 hours.
Excuses aside, with strong regulations in place, not one U.S. carrier was in the position to be held on the tarmac for more than three hours. Avoiding tarmac delays can be done and, if the airlines cannot figure out how to handle tarmac delays on their own as part of treating passengers as human beings rather than crated cargo, DOT must levy heavy fines to “encourage” airline, even foreign ones carrying our citizens, to make adequate plans to deal with these predicted weather disasters.
Let’s hope that the “problems” within DOT with the proposed rulemaking get solved and that these overdue passenger protections find their way to the Secretary of Transportation’s desk then to the White House where they can be approved for inclusion in the federal regulations this spring.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
