I have just one question in the wake of the Transportation Department’s so-called “historic” rulemaking on airline passenger rights.
RULEMAKING
After months of comments and deliberation, the Transportation Department this morning released its final consumer protection rules for airline passengers. I covered the proposed rulemaking extensively on this site last year. Here’s a side-by-side comparison between the proposed and final rule (PDF).
The federal government is giving travelers an extra month to comment on proposed new consumer rules for airline passengers.
If you’ve ever complained about air travel — and who hasn’t? — then here’s your best chance in a generation to do something about it.
Ban peanuts? Really?
As someone who is currently being sued, you might think I’m the last person who would support a new rule that would allow more people to file a lawsuit against an airline.
If you’ve ever experienced a flight delay — and who hasn’t? — then you know that getting reliable updates from your airline can take an Act of Congress.
When you get a fare quote from an airline or online agency, you should expect to pay that price. Right?
The deeper I wade into the new airline passenger rules, the more I find myself wondering: Why do airlines have to be told to do this?
Talk is cheap. That’s the gist of the part of the latest government rulemaking that is likely to give airlines the biggest headache. Instead of just “strongly encouraging” the airlines to adopt customer service plans, the government wants them to put it in their contracts of carriage, the legal agreement between them and their customers.
The heart of the government’s new rulemaking on air travel is a requirement that would set minimum customer service standards for air carriers. The government has never attempted anything this ambitious, and it is bound to be flooded with emails from airline employees and apologists demanding that it back down.
Attention, airlines: The government wants to know more about your tarmac delays.
There may be reason why the first order of business in the Transportation Department’s new rulemaking on passenger rights addresses the problem of tarmac delays. These rare but completely needless ground delays have been a political hotbutton, leading to previous action by the department that effectively bans airlines from keeping passengers parked on a taxiway for more than three hours.
Today’s sweeping rulemaking proposal by the Transportation Department is so enormous, it can’t be analyzed in a single post. But let’s not bury the lede as they say in journalism: The government wants to do us all a big favor by requiring airlines to post a “full price” — including all mandatory fees.
Are the government’s airline cops about to get tough on crime? The Department of Transportation says it is, and now there’s new evidence that it’s following through.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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