| U.S. Department of Transportation has investigated major U.S.
airlines
and concluded that they are not fulfilling their promises to their
customers.
The inspector general has identified five major areas where airlines
did fail to live up to their promises to consumer and issued the
recommendations to airlines. However, the office has no legal
enforcement options outside of court, so these recommendations remain
just friendly recommendations for now.
In 1999, after Congress introduced "air travelers' bill or rights",
major U.S. air carriers voluntarily agreed to adopt "consumer service
commitments", which show in detail what airlines owe to consumers in
various situations. The recent inspection by the U.S. Department of
Transportation revealed that airlines were not living up to those
commitments.
Standards set in 1999 call for informing consumers about delays and
cancellations at least once per twenty minutes, but the study
conducted at seventeen national airports revealed that announcements
about delayed flights and cancelled flights were beyond the 20 minutes
time frame in over forty percent of cases. Furthermore, the provided
information was not adequate in some forty five percent of test cases.
These figures show that airlines service level is not satisfactory and
hardly acceptable to their consumers.
Besides the untimely information about delayed flights and flight
cancellations, major US airlines are not fulfilling consumer
expectations of frequent-flier programs. While airlines make it
relatively easy to collect frequent flier points for consumers, they
do not provide adequate information on redemptions and specific
conditions on those collected air miles. Most on the times airlines
lawyers lay out the conditions in a fine print, and make it so that
consumers have no legal rights and have very few opportunities to use
their air miles. |
The U.S. Department of Transportation has concluded that major U.S. airlines do not provide customers with timely information on delayed and canceled flights. Airlines issued a statement blaming the delays on one customer of theirs: "Time flies."
