Airlines winging it on customer service

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published August 20, 2007

With flights fuller than they have ever been, delays at a 13-year high and airlines routinely overbooking flights, this summer has been one long, miserable travel ordeal.

The airline industry's response to its financial shake-out has been to reduce staffing, slash payrolls and use smaller planes to service domestic routes. With most seats on desirable routes sold out or nearly so, carriers may be more profitable. But the tighter operating margins leave little room for something to go wrong - and all too often something does.

Passengers who miss a connection due to a flight delay, face a canceled flight or are involuntarily bumped sometimes have to wait all day or even days before reaching their destinations. There are simply not enough available seats on other departing flights. It is a mess that will invite federal regulation if the airlines themselves don't clean up their act.

Congress got pretty attentive after February winter storms caused huge disruptions and JetBlue infamously kept passengers at New York's JFK Airport on the tarmac for up to 11 hours without much food or working toilets. JetBlue quickly adopted its own passenger's Bill of Rights in response. Now the creeping increase in the number and duration of flight delays and the difficulty passengers have finding alternate flights are hard to ignore.

Through the first five months of this year, more than 25 percent of all flights within the United States experienced delays. In June, the portion jumped to 30 percent, with nearly one in eight flights more than 45 minutes behind schedule between June 1 and July 15.

But even those numbers are deceiving. They don't come close to telling the story of what airline passengers are up against. Flights that are canceled or diverted to other cities are not part of the statistics. And in June, 40 airlines canceled 20,301 flights, more than twice the number from the same time the previous year.

When missed connections and flight cancellations are added to the delay numbers, according to research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, average wait times increase by two-thirds.

This more comprehensive data should be made available to passengers who can better decide which airline does a better job honoring the terms of its tickets. The airlines' practice of overbooking flights to compensate for no-show passengers should also be reined in. This year, 56,000 people are expected to be involuntarily bumped off flights they had booked, a new high for the decade. That's bad for passengers, bad for the airline industry and bad for anyone who wants the government to stay out of it. A little more self-policing by the airline industry seems to be in order.

They may get a welcome nudge from Washington. For the first time in 29 years, the Department of Transportation is considering raising the compensation that airlines must pay bumped passengers.

It's been a long, hot summer - much of it spent in airports looking at revised flight schedules. The airline industry is in trouble, and one reason is that too many passengers must worry that their ticket to get them where they need to go is backed by little more than a wing and a prayer.

[Last modified August 19, 2007, 20:41:32]