After years of urging from consumer groups and authorization from congress, the Department of Transportation finally issued a legislative proposal requiring airlines to seat children age 13 or under adjacent to a family member or accompanying adult without paying a seat-selection fee. I can't believe how long it has taken DoT to reach this point, but here we are. You can expect final action soon.
You can also expect some airlines to contest a new rule. They will follow their long-standing pattern of response to consumer complaints. Normally, they ignore obvious consumer pain points indefinitely, even if they could easily fix the problem on their own.
Then, when the mass of complaints becomes overwhelming and the DoT issues a rule, they whine about "excessive regulation." The new rule will benefit just about everybody who flies: Travelers without children will have the added freedom from what often happens now. Flight attendants, dealing with separated families during boarding, typically try to arrange an ad-hoc accommodation by asking an unrelated traveler to switch seats so that a family can sit together.
All too often, that means asking a traveler to trade a paid-for aisle or window seat for a detested middle seat—a really inferior product no matter what airlines claim. The proposed rule applies to "an air carrier or foreign air carrier," without any additional detail. So far, four of the 10 airlines DoT considers as "large" have voluntarily made a commitment to fee-free family seating: Alaska, American, Frontier, and JetBlue.
Presumably, it will apply to the other six large domestic lines and foreign carrier flights originating in the U.S. but not to foreign carrier flights into the U.
S. Leading consumer advocates are hailing the DoT announcement, as they should, given their long pursuit of such an action. But there are still lots of consumer issues still on the table for DoT to consider, including requiring longer validity periods for airline credit vouchers issued in lieu of cash refunds, setting minimum seat sizes for commercial airlines, and treatment of a long list of "junk fees" that have arisen.
Many of these issues are complicated and do not have the easy answer that family seating does. Which junk fees are really junk; which are legitimate breakouts of optional services is an ongoing question that everyone involved is trying to sort. And meaningful minimum seat size increases to a level of reasonable comfort would entail an unacceptable economic penalty: There is no way airlines could provide adequately wide seats with the standard six-across seating on the ubiquitous 737 and A320 families of jets.
If you have a complaint about any airline practice, I encourage you to file a formal complaint with the DoT. The Department relies heavily on the gross number of complaints it receives when deciding which issues to tackle. Although the Department isn't likely to subsume any individual complaint instance with an airline, the volume of complaints matters big time.
You can submit online here ( https://secure.dot.gov/air-travel-complaint ).
It's not at all clear if we can expect any additional rule proposals during the few months remaining in the current administration. Most of the ongoing issues will likely carry over into the next administration, and we have no idea how receptive the next one will be to consumer issues. If s new DoT doesn't act aggressively, it will be for lack of interest, not lack of important issues.
At this point, we can only hope for the best. (Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at [email protected] .
Also, check out Ed’s new rail travel website at www.rail-guru.com .
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