Pete Buttigieg Reflects on Traveling the U.S. As Transportation Secretary, Proud Moments of the Administration, and More

10.12.2024 - 19:25 / travelandleisure.com / Pete Buttigieg / Trump

In 2022, you could use words like “total chaos,” and “an incomparable nightmare” to describe the state of American air travel, and it would barely be hyperbolic. Mass cancellations and delays were the norm — and then when travelers ended up stranded and there was no incentive for airlines to provide any sort of compensation. By that time, Secretary Pete Buttigieg had been heading up the Department of Transportation (DOT) for nearly two years, and was just starting to put some bigger plans in motion for passenger rights. 

Then, in December 2022, everything changed. Southwest Airlines had historic levels of  cancellations over the winter holiday travel period; it was so catastrophic it was universally dubbed “the meltdown.” By that point, most American passengers had reached a point of hopeless exhaustion.

That didn’t hold true for much longer. The following year, Buttigieg’s DOT went into overdrive. Not only were there major announcements like the family seating policy, but 2023 brought forth something no one saw coming: real consequences for airline errors. The DOT filed a $140 million civil penalty against Southwest for the 2022 holiday meltdown, requiring $90 million of that to be paid back to affected customers. 

Now, after two years of some of the most dramatic expansion of airline passenger rights in US history, Sec. Buttigieg is slated to leave office in 2025. He will be replaced by President-elect Donald Trump’s appointee, former Fox News host Sean Duffy.

Travel + Leisure spoke with Sec. Buttigieg in his last weeks as head of the DOT about his record, what American airline passengers can expect to change in the coming years, and his time working in the “best job in the federal government.”

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Travel+ Leisure: As you transition out of office, can Americans expect to maintain the consumer protections gained in regards to airlines and travel, as we go into this new administration? 

Sec. Buttigieg: Of course, we can’t know for sure what the next administration will do, but a few things are encouraging for me. First of all, some of what we have done is now encoded in law. So the automatic refunds principle, for example, began as a rule making, but it wound up in the FAA legislation, which means it's not something that any administration can unilaterally change. It's the law of the land.

I would also say that, beyond the ones that are specifically in statute, many of the things we've done, I think Americans expect to continue to have access to the information at FlightRights.Gov—people expect to have that kind of information, and those customer service plans stand and they're enforceable. 

Now it is true that an airline could change what's in those plans, but I think in a transparent market,