Flying Is Worse Than Ever After Massive Airline Bailout, Consumer Watchdog Says

Flying is worse than ever after taxpayers gave airlines a $54 billion bailout during the pandemic, a new report by a public interest research group says.

The report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group analyzed Department of Transportation data on consumer complaints about airline travel and airline performance. The report found consumer complaints have quadrupled from 2019 to 2022, which was the worst year since 2001 (not including 2020 data). This doesn’t include data from December, when Southwest Airlines melted down and canceled a quarter of its flights during the Christmas travel period, because DOT received so many complaints that month it hasn’t been able to review and process the data yet.

“In a nutshell, just about everything negative got worse in 2022: complaints, cancellations, delays, involuntary bumping and baggage handling,” the study’s author, Teresa Murray, wrote on PIRG’s website, “all while the number of air travelers for the full year of 2022 was below 2019 levels.”

A key reason for this tanking performance is a labor shortage. The whole point of the $54 billion bailout during the height of the pandemic, like the other pandemic-era economic programs, was to prevent airlines from laying off workers. Indeed, a ban on laying off workers was one of the few conditions of airlines taking the bailout money. Instead, according to the PIRG report, airlines offered lucrative buyouts and early retirement packages, shrinking its workforce by more than 20 percent between February and October of 2020. This left the airlines unprepared to handle a surge in travelers, from 322 million in 2020 to 648 million in 2021 and almost 800 million in 2022. 

The tanking performance of the nation’s airlines comes as the actual act of booking and flying on an airplane is increasingly frustrating. Airlines have become obsessed with all manner of hidden fees, “basic economy” fares whose branding and definitions vary airline to airline, and an increasingly dwindling list of basic services or amenities every passenger gets, a list that no longer includes former basics like overhead bin space. In this way, airlines are turning back a page in their playbooks to the post-Great Recession days, when virtually all of the airline industry’s profits came from newly-instituted bag fees.

To reverse this trend, PIRG recommends a series of measures to increase transparency and accountability in the airline industry. Fees should be standardized and disclosed up-front, much as airlines are legally required to include taxes and fees in the listed fare. Full refunds for cancellations or excessive delays are required by law, but airlines often try to weasel out of them by offering vouchers or other goodies instead, or simply making the process of getting a refund as difficult as possible. Consumers are still owed upwards of $10 billion in refunds from flights canceled during the pandemic, according to PIRG. This is not how it works in other industries and countries; for example, many train services around the world will automatically and instantaneously refund passengers when a trip is canceled or a delay exceeds a pre-set duration. Airlines could also ease the pain of cancellations with an industry-wide agreement for re-booking passengers on alternate flights regardless of airline. Only some airlines participate in such a program now.

Various levels of government have also taken greater interest in airline performance recently, particularly in the wake of the Southwest Airlines meltdown. DOT is working on numerous proposals on transparent pricing and refunds for busted WiFi. So far, DOT has mostly been slapping airlines on the wrist with token fines; $7.25 million spread across six airlines for withholding more than $600 million in mandatory refunds, for example. In June, Bernie Sanders urged Transportation Secretary Pete Buttiegieg to fine airlines when flights are delayed for more than two hours or canceled because of staffing shortages.