Government a ‘watchdog’ to keep airlines in line
Even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is not immune to travel headaches.
“I mean, like anybody else, it’s frustrating to get canceled or delayed and it happened to me the other day,” Buttigieg told USA TODAY in an interview. “Luckily, the delay was not so extreme that I missed my trip, but there have been times when we had to find a different way to get somewhere because of a cancellation, just as millions of Americans have experienced.”
Those disruptions can range from minor annoyances to major system failures, such as Southwest Airlines’ meltdown over the holidays or the Federal Aviation Administration system outage that grounded all U.S. flights in January. Buttigieg and the Department of Transportation have taken aim at a range of issues in an effort to improve air travel, and just this week launched a dashboard outlining airline policies for family seat selection.
USA TODAY spoke to Buttigieg about other steps the DOT is taking to hold airlines accountable and streamline travel, from policy changes to airport improvements. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Question: What has been your commercial air travel experience?
Answer: Well, look, I’m a very frequent flyer, as you might imagine. I take at least a trip a week, usually on any number of the major airlines, and so I feel like we always have a chance to mystery shop how the airlines are doing when I’m pushing them to raise the bar on customer service. What we’ve seen is, overall, outside of extreme weather events, a general improvement in terms of cancellations and delays. But there’s still more work to do in terms of improv
ing that customer service experience. Will “significant delays” ever be officially defined by the DOT?
Yeah, that’s something we’re working on right now, and we’re going to have hearings coming up (this month) so that passengers and others can weigh in about their experience. We think right now there’s a pretty clear practice that has allowed us to give people refunds and benefits, but we do think that needs to be more specifically codified in regulation. We’re working on a process to try to get that right as we speak.
Editor’s note: U.S. airlines are required by the DOT to give passengers refunds if their flights are outright canceled and they choose not to travel, but the rules around delays are a little murkier. There’s no federal requirement for passengers to receive a refund or reimbursement as a result of a flight delay. DOT has not specifically defined a “significant delay” that would require customer compensation.
In addition to the dashboard, what else is the DOT working on to ban airlines from charging families to sit together?
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t have to pay in order to sit next to your kids on a flight. I think most of us think that’s pretty common sense, but that hasn’t been the official policy of any of the major airlines up until now. It’s why we called on them to guarantee this in writing, to make it their official policy, and when they do, we’re getting enforceable commitments so that we could respond if there are any violations in that policy.
So far, three out of the top 10 airlines have responded and made that commitment. We’re calling on all of the airlines to do the same.
The reason we’re doing the regulation at the same time is because we want to make sure that that is an enforceable industrywide standard. But we’re doing a both/and approach, and the reason is that regulations and rules – just because of the way the law works – take a very long time to finalize (and) put into effect, and passengers shouldn’t have to wait for that. So, my message to the airlines is, we’re going to do the work to require you to do this, but don’t make us finish the regulation to do the right thing. Do the right thing now. And we’re still going to mandate it.
In the aftermath of the Southwest debacle, what has the DOT done to hold the airline accountable?
Yeah, the investigation is still open, so there’s some things I can’t talk about right now. But what I’ll say is that we are continuing to follow up on complaints that our department is receiving, and when it’s something that we can’t tell if the airline got first, we’re sending it to the airline saying, “You’ve got to take care of this customer who came and told us that they didn’t get their reimbursement, their refund,” or whatever it is.
We’re also investigating the possibility of unfair scheduling. That’s when an airline knowingly schedules flights that they’re not going to be able to serve.
Southwest said that they are making operational changes. How is the DOT working with them?
Well, it’s their responsibility to get this done. We can hold them accountable for the outcome. So we’re not going to go in and tell them what software to use. We are going to tell them that they have to meet a better standard of customer service.
And this is a very Southwest-specific issue. You know, that winter storm that hit around Christmas really crippled the entire system, but every other airline recovered pretty quickly. Southwest moved in the opposite direction. ... We don’t view our role as running the airline, but we’re a watchdog. We have to make sure they run their airline properly.