DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Cartoon of a wide-eyed woman staring at a computer screen while booking a trip, packed luggage stacked beside her.

Airlines want to hide the real price of your ticket. Should the government let them?

by

Remember what booking a flight used to be like? You would spot a $99 fare, click it, and then meet the carrier-imposed surcharge. Then the mandatory fuel surcharge. Then, somewhere near the end, the taxes. By checkout, your $99 flight cost $180. In 2011, the Department of Transportation put a stop to it with the full-fare rule, which says the price an airline shows you has to be the price you pay, taxes and fees included, and that the total has to be the most prominent number in the ad. The airlines went to court to kill the rule and lost, and travelers have shopped with confidence ever since. Now that standard is back on the table. The DOT has proposed letting airlines display each piece of a fare just as prominently as the total, and it is separately asking whether the rule should be repealed outright, which would allow advertised fares that leave out taxes and mandatory fees altogether. The department calls the current requirement unnecessarily prescriptive and raises legal questions about it. Consumer advocates answer that a price you cannot actually buy at is not a price.

Black and white cartoon of a cruise ship docked beside a high prison wall topped with razor wire and a guard tower.

The FBI wants you to report cruise crime. Then what?

by

The FBI has a message for cruise passengers as vacation season begins: if you are assaulted, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted at sea, report it right away. It is good advice. Of course you should report a crime. But the announcement leaves out what happens after you speak up. The law meant to track crime at sea, passed in 2010, counts only a short list of the most serious categories. Its requirements generally reach incidents involving U.S. nationals, which leaves out most crew members and plenty of passengers. Thefts count only above a dollar threshold. And an assault is reportable only if it causes “serious bodily injury,” a term the law never defines, which turns a beating into a judgment call. Here is the part that deserves a longer look: the FBI tells passengers to report incidents to the cruise line, and the cruise line is the one that reports them to the government. A company sells you a safe vacation, then helps decide whether what happened to you counts as a crime worth counting.

Black and white cartoon of a puzzled traveler with a question mark overhead watching two airplanes fly away in opposite directions.

America and Europe just went opposite ways on airline fees. Who’s right?

by

How much of an airline ticket’s price do you deserve to see when you shop for a flight? The United States and Europe just answered that question within days of each other, and came to opposite conclusions. In America, a rule that would have required airlines and booking sites to show you the cost of a checked bag or a ticket change the first time a fare appeared never survived. A federal appeals court blocked it before any airline had to comply, then threw it out entirely, faulting the government for skipping a step rather than finding fee transparency unlawful. Instead of redoing the rule, regulators made the defeat official and restored the older standard: airlines note that fees may apply and point you toward the fine print. Europe went the other way, approving its first overhaul of air passenger rights in more than two decades, with fares that must include the cost of a standard carry-on from the outset. Airlines argue that unbundling lets travelers who skip the extras pay less, and that every mandatory fee is disclosed before you buy. Consumer advocates counter that a fare hiding the bag charge is not really a price at all.

Black and white cartoon of a small couple with suitcases standing on a dark horizon, watching a paper airplane folded from a banknote fly up and away into a vast cloudy sky.

Air travelers deserve stronger consumer protections—in Europe and the U.S.

by

Mila Schoun knew what his downgrade was worth, but his airline pretended it did not. Schoun and his wife had paid Swiss International Air Lines for premium economy on a flight from Prague to Miami, and then the airline changed aircraft and put them in regular economy for the 10-hour crossing. He asked for the difference back. Swiss refused. What Schoun had on his side, even if he had never heard of it, was EC 261, a 21-year-old European regulation that makes airlines pay when they cancel, bump, strand, or downgrade you, and that quietly protects millions of Americans on any flight leaving an EU airport. Europe just spent the spring fighting over whether to gut that law, with the airline lobby pushing to raise the delay threshold and erase most claims. Passengers appear to have dodged the worst of it. But there is a quieter problem that no one in Brussels lobbied for and no one fought against, one that has been draining the value out of this protection for two decades while everyone argued about something else.

Black and white cartoon of a frazzled airline passenger facing a smiling gate agent at a counter, who holds up a document labeled "OUR RULES," illustrating the gap between what travelers want and what the DOT's disclosure rule actually delivers.

Congress asked for passenger rights. It got a PDF

by

Airline passengers are tired of standing at the gate while agents hand out excuses. The Department of Transportation has a fix. Soon, airlines will hand out a piece of paper instead. The DOT just finalized a rule requiring airlines to publish a one-page summary of passengers’ rights. Congress ordered it eight years ago. The rule does not set any compensation amounts. It does not require meals, hotels, or rebooking when there is a delay. Each airline only has to briefly summarize its own existing policies, in whatever format it likes. The rule also skipped the public comment period, and in a detail that is hard to make up, the summaries are not even due yet, because carriers cannot submit anything until a separate government approval process is complete. When the regulated industry shrugs at a new regulation, that means something, and this rule drew no objection at all.

Illustration of an Aer Lingus representative offering a voucher to a frustrated customer checking his watch, with the caption “One year later…”

Aer Lingus issued her voucher but ghosted her husband for over a year

by

After a death in the family, Beatrijs Albarran and her husband Jorge had to cancel their Aer Lingus flights. The airline issued their refunds as vouchers, $938 for her and $925 for him, and emailed that both had been processed. But when Beatrijs called the next month to book a new trip, an agent told her Jorge’s voucher was never actually issued. The couple, who live in Buffalo, New York, wanted to fly from Toronto to Scotland because the fares are better, and asked whether the vouchers could be reissued in Canadian dollars. Beatrijs received hers in U.S. dollars within a reasonable time. Jorge’s never arrived. For more than a year she called repeatedly, hearing the same response that a supervisor was working on it, while automated emails said the case was under review. More than 15 months after Aer Lingus said it processed the voucher, it still had not appeared. Under Aer Lingus policy, vouchers are issued in the same currency as the original booking, so no conversion was needed to book from a Canadian airport, and the Department of Transportation requires airlines to process refund and credit requests promptly.

An angry airline passenger stands with a suitcase while holding a $10 voucher after a flight delay.

The delay tax: Why your airline voucher barely covers your expenses anymore 

by

When a flight is delayed or canceled, airlines cover only what they call duty of care: a meal voucher, sometimes a hotel, or a refund if the flight is canceled. Angela Justice received a $10 voucher after her Boston to Chicago flight was canceled. The real cost, the delay tax, is far larger. It includes nonrefundable hotels travelers cannot reach, lost wages, child care that keeps ticking, and the replacement flights passengers must book themselves when the airline’s rescheduling timeline proves useless. Airlines calculate compensation based on what it costs them to reschedule a flight, not what it costs the traveler to miss the reason they flew in the first place. The official story is that duty of care solves the problem and the Department of Transportation signs off. But the law was written in a different era, when travel was simpler and airlines were more generous, and regulators have not caught up now that delays are chronic and carriers watch every penny.

Soft pastel digital illustration of a young teenage girl with a messy brown bun and large worried eyes standing alone with her arms crossed and a small brown shoulder bag, beside her dark blue rolling suitcase, in the middle of a busy blurred airport terminal with other travelers and luggage in the background, illustrating a 13-year-old unaccompanied minor stranded at LAX after United Airlines denied boarding for a connecting flight the airline itself had authorized

United authorized my teen’s connecting flight, then left her stranded at LAX

by

Shiri Willcot’s travel agent tried to book her 13-year-old daughter Ryan on a connecting flight from Los Angeles to Costa Rica via Houston, but United Airlines policy prohibits unaccompanied minors ages 5 to 14 on connecting flights. A United supervisor overrode the system, approved the reservation, and charged Willcot’s credit card the $300 unaccompanied minor fee. The travel agent reconfirmed the booking twice before departure, and a United representative on a recorded call two days before the flight confirmed Ryan could board without issue. At LAX, United agents refused to let Ryan board. For a month afterward, United claimed no record of the original flight existed despite confirmation emails, the credit card charge, and the recorded call. The airline gave three contradicting explanations before settling on its final narrative blaming the travel agency.

Editorial illustration showing a single white airplane taking off down a runway between two large fields of grounded yellow Spirit Airlines aircraft on either side, viewed from behind, illustrating how thousands of Spirit Airlines passengers were left stranded after the carrier's shutdown while one rescue flight departs without them

Spirit Airlines’ death shows why we need better passenger protections

by

Tens of thousands of Spirit Airlines passengers discovered their tickets were worthless this week after the carrier collapsed. JetBlue is reportedly in financial distress and several ultralow-cost carriers including Frontier, Allegiant, and Avelo have lined up at the federal aid window. Before deregulation in 1978, Rule 240 required airlines to put stranded passengers on a competitor’s next available flight at no extra cost. Congress brought a version back as Section 145 of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act after 9/11, but it expired in 2005. The DOT issued Order 2026-5-1 encouraging rescue fares but cannot compel airlines to honor competitor tickets without congressional action.

Editorial illustration showing a thin man with brown hair and round glasses standing with arms crossed next to two orange roller suitcases on an airport tarmac with palm trees and a small white airplane visible in the background, illustrating a passenger left stranded after an airline schedule change forced him to buy replacement flights at his own expense

Aeromexico offered him a “free” flight change. Then it refused to give him one.

by

Jorrit Muller booked Aeromexico flight 335 from Puerto Vallarta to Orlando for a wedding. Three months before departure, Aeromexico shifted his flight one hour earlier, into the reception time. The airline notified him that if the new flight did not work, he could move to another at no additional cost. When he tried to use that offer through Aeromexico’s WhatsApp support, the available flights were operated by Delta as code-share. An agent told him to request a refund instead, then Aeromexico denied the refund. Under DOT rules, a significant change for international travel requires a schedule shift of six hours or more.