A ray of hope in dark skies

12.08.2024 - 10:44 / insider.com / Pete Buttigieg / William Macgee

I do not know anyone who heads to the airport and thinks to themselves, "Oh man, I bet this is going to be an awesome experience." Just booking a flight means contemplating a sliding scale of unfortunate scenarios. What if my bag is lost? What if the flight is overbooked? What do I do if it's delayed or canceled? Once you get to the airport, things only get worse: the headache that is maneuvering through long security lines, swallowing eye-popping airport prices, or wondering just how scared you should be if you wind up on a Boeing. At this point, it's more of a pleasant surprise if a flight actually goes as planned.

Beyond the low-level dread that accompanies every trip, several high-profile recent incidents have driven home how frustrating air travel can be. Southwest's December 2022 meltdown, due in large part to its outdated scheduling system, resulted in nearly 17,000 flight cancellations and more than 2 million stranded passengers. This summer, Delta canceled thousands of flights as it struggled to recover from the CrowdStrike outage.

Before you set your passport on fire and declare that from here on out you'll only be hitting the great American highways for vacation, know that help is on the way. On the consumer front, the federal government is trying to make flying less disastrous where possible. It's making it so that when the airlines have an oops, they don't get to hold on to your money — and they can't wait until you have a hissy fit to give you a refund. In the wake of the pandemic, for example, the Department of Transportation took action against six airlines that dragged their feet on giving passengers over $600 million in refunds. The government is also trying to make airlines be up front about fees and ax some charges. The message to the airline industry: You've had a few too many screwups to be left to your own devices.

"This goes through cycles," said Bob Mann, an aviation analyst. "Airlines behave badly, airlines behave badly. Customers react, customers react. Finally, the DOT reacts."

William McGee, a longtime consumer advocate and senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank, is a guy who thinks a lot about all the problems with the airline industry. He was fairly unimpressed with President Joe Biden's administration, particularly Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for the first year or two, but now he's a fan. The airline industry's screwups in recent years, capped off by the Southwest debacle, were the "turning point" that, in his view, got the administration to step up.

"I've seen more progress in the last year on consumer protections than I have — I'm not being hyperbolic — in the last 15," he said.

Over