Posted by Seth on January 30, 2012 under Flying, News | 
I love when our elected representatives decide to speak up and express just how idiotic their thoughts are. I’ve heard a Representative state for the record that she thought Adobe Acrobat should be outlawed, for example, but I’m not so convinced that her view there is more ridiculous than that put forth today by Representative Tom Graves of Georgia. Graves, who represents Georgia’s 9th Congressional District (North of Atlanta, up to the Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama borders), has announced that he will be introducing legislation which will repeal the DoT rule requiring airlines to list the full price of tickets, including all taxes, when they advertise.
This rule, put forth as part of the DoT’s consumer protection efforts, has come under attack from such legendary consumer advocates as Sprit Airlines, who is complaining the rule violates their first amendment rights because they cannot advertise one number and then charge a completely different number when the customer goes to actually make the purchase. Seems like just the sort of actions that should be protected, right?
The Congressman has a very simple premise for why the rule is bad: It prevents the airlines from indicating what part of the fare is actually the fare and what part is taxes and fees.
The federal government should not be inserting itself in the private sector to limit consumers’ ability to see how much they’re getting taxed. If the American people can’t see these costs clearly, I fear it will be easier these fees and taxes to be raised without their knowledge.
There’s just one problem with this line of thought (two, really, but I’m ignoring that the second line there isn’t a complete sentence): it is completely unfounded in reality. There is absolutely nothing in the rule that prevents the airlines from explaining in excruciating detail how much the taxes are and how much the fare is. There is nothing preventing them from reminding the consumer that there are a dozen or so different taxes and fees on the average airfare and way more on international itineraries. What the rule does, however, is prevent an airline from advertising a $9 fare which cannot be purchased for less than $20, no matter how hard you try. And that’s a good thing for consumers.
Fare listings like these, which are fully compliant with the rules, make it quite clear what the taxes and fees are, without violating the DoT rules:
And, yet, somehow apparently it is actually impossible for the airlines and OTAs to actually publish the information this way, as they are inhibited by the DoT rules. Strange, isn’t it, how they’ve managed to do it anyways??
I understand the complaint that nothing else in the USA is required to be marketed with the all-in price rather than allowing for customers to be surprised at the cash register. Let’s not use the examples of things that are bad for us as citizens as examples of why progress shouldn’t be made. Let’s got the other direction instead. Let’s hold hotels and rental car companies accountable, too. Let’s stop rental car companies from hiding the 50%+ surcharges until the final page of the check-out process. Let’s stop hotels from adding on $15-30 or more, per guest, per night, as a "resort fee" rather than actually including those charges in the fine print. After all, you cannot avoid paying them.
There is nothing wrong with calling attention to the fact that the average airfare has so many taxes associated with it. But pretending that there is some unwritten rule out there which is somehow preventing airlines from actually doing so is just plain lying.
Time to step up and face the facts, Congressman Graves: you’re full of it. Step up and do something that actually helps your constituents rather than lying to them. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it when elections roll around.
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Posted by Seth on January 24, 2012 under Flying, News |
Spirit Airlines is protesting the new fare rules requiring full disclosure of all costs for a flight, claiming that the government is requiring them to hide the taxes from their customers. And they’re doing it in style. Their main homepage now shows this when you visit:
If you click the link offered you get this:
Thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s latest fare rules, Spirit must now HIDE the government’s taxes and fees in your fares.
If the government can hide taxes in your airfares, then they can carry out their hidden agenda and quietly increase their taxes. (Yes, such talks are already underway.)
And if they can do it to the airline industry, what’s next?
As the transparency leader and most consumer-friendly airline, Spirit DOES NOT support this new USDOT mandate. We believe the better form of transparency is to break out costs so customers know exactly what they’re buying.
The scary thing here is that I almost actually agree with them.
It is true that, by requiring the big, final price number to be displayed to the customer the actual tax burden is obfuscated. So they’re not really wrong there. But that obfuscation also prevents all sorts of other fees from being hidden, the sorts of fees that Spirit is famous for. And that’s a good thing.
Plus, at the end of the day, most customers care much less about how much of the fare is for taxes and how much is for the airline. A $300 ticket is a $300 debit on my credit card. Whether the airline keeps $150 or $250 of that doesn’t skew whether I think it is a good price for the trip.
Besides, there is nothing stopping Spirit from showing the full breakdown underneath the all-in price. That way they can continue to be a "transparency leader and most consumer-friendly airline" as they always have.
Posted by Seth on October 12, 2011 under Flying, News |
The deal for US Airways and Delta to trade large chunks of their operations at New York City‘s LaGuardia and Washington, DC‘s National airports has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The swap, which has been in limbo since it was initially proposed about two years ago, will see Delta increase its market share significantly in the New York area, bringing it on par with United Airlines which has held a significant lead thanks to the hub operations at Newark by its Continental subsidiary.
The final agreement calls for Delta to gain 132 slot pairs at LaGuardia in exchange for 42 slot pairs that US Airways will gain in Washington. An additional 24 slot pairs – 16 in NYC and 8 in Washington – will be divested by the carriers to competitors. The divestment plan, which pretty much matches the original proposal from years ago, will have the slots auctioned in a cash-only, blind bid offering managed by the FAA. With the Southwest buyout of AirTran and acquisition of those slot portfolios the Texas-based carrier is no longer in as strong a position to oppose the swap or the blind distribution of the slot divestiture.
In addition to the FAA review of the slot swap there is a Department of Justice Anti-Trust investigation ongoing for the transaction. The DoJ announced that they are no longer concerned with the anti-trust implications in the New York City market but they are still looking into the US Airways monopoly issues at National. If that is too significant an issue it could still result in the deal being scuttled but at this point it does seem like the deal is quite likely to go through.
This represents a significant shake-up in both markets. Delta has not been shy recently about wanting to attack the New York City market and taking a sizeable chunk of that market share from competitors. They will still be running a split hub environment with major operations at both LaGuardia and JFK airports but they’ll have significantly more traffic going forward. For the Washington, DC market the domination at National by US Airways will be much more significant (hence the continued DoJ efforts).
Still plenty of excitement and new developments to come on this front but things are finally back in motion after being stalled for so long.
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Tags: AirTran, Continental, Delta, DoT, FAA, merger, New York City, Newark, Southwest Airline, United, US Air, Washington DC
Posted by Seth on September 27, 2011 under Flying, News |
The "3-hour rule" regarding flight delays was supposed to make things better for passengers by preventing them from being stuck on airplanes on the ground rather than actually flying. And the statistics year-over-year since the rule was implemented are pretty clear: the number of 3 hour delays dropped from 693 to 20 the year before and year after the rule was implemented. Great news, right?
Maybe not. According to a recent report from the GAO the reduced delays come with a side-effect of making flight cancellations much more likely:
GAO analysis suggests the rule is also correlated with a greater likelihood of flight cancellations. Such cancellations can lead to long overall passenger travel times. Airlines and other aviation stakeholders maintain that the tarmac delay rule has changed airline decision-making in ways that could make cancellations more likely.
The report is 111 pages of tables, statistics and generally dry reading. But there are some telling numbers that come out of it. The GAO performed two different regression analyses against the data covering 70 airports around the USA and Puerto Rico. Data was reviewed for both flights canceled before they left the gate and after they left the gate and began to taxi. Unsurprisingly, more flights are canceled at the gate than once they’ve pushed back. But the data from 2010 – after the new rule went into effect – suggests that cancelations are notably more common in both scenarios.
The number of flights cancelled in each year was incredibly small once the plane actually left the gate. Only 992 flights of the 1,846,288 scheduled flights that pushed back from the gate ended up not flying. But that number was 24% higher weighted for the total number of scheduled flights. And the chances of a cancelation are dramatically higher as the time on the tarmac grows. A plane that has been taxiing for more than 60 minutes was 88% more likely not to fly. Over 120 minutes that number was 216%. For flights that never left the gate the odds of a cancellation were also higher, to the tune of 13% year-over-year with 2010 having just over 1% of flights canceled at the gate.
Those are the unadjusted, raw data numbers from the DoT and FlightStats reports. The GAO also performed regression analysis to determine what other factors – weather, ATC, flight distance, time of day and others – might affect the cancelation rates to see if the rule is better or worse than other effects. The numbers do not appear all that promising for passengers. For the Tarmac-Cancellation Model (post push-back) the GAO has the following to say:
In all hour categories of tarmac time, the odds of cancellation were greater in 2010 than in 2009 because all of the odds ratios exceed 1. Moreover, the differential in the odds ratio of cancellations across the 2 years increased with the time a flight was on the tarmac. For flights that were on the tarmac for less than an hour, the odds of a cancellation were about one-third higher in 2010 than in 2009. … For flights with 61 to 120 minutes of tarmac delay, the odds ratio rose to 2.14, indicating that the odds of a cancellation more than doubled in 2010 compared with 2009, and for flights with 121 to 180 minutes of tarmac delay, the odds of cancellation more than tripled in that same time period. …[T]he inclusion of key variables to control for other factors did not have much effect on our findings related to the tarmac rule.
For the Gate-Cancellation Model the numbers are actually even more dramatic:
One significant finding is that the odds ratio for the rule change is substantially greater, when adjusted, than indicated by the simple unadjusted odds ratio shown in table 16. The model results indicate that the odds of gate cancellations rose by 24 percent after the rule went into effect, whereas the simple result indicated only a 13 percent increase in those odds.
Yes, fewer folks are sitting on the airplanes, but fewer are also actually getting where they are going. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
The report recommendations are pretty toothless, suggesting that the DoT collect more data than they do today and better analyze it for comprehensive impact against passengers. Not likely that will have much impact in the long run.
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Posted by Seth on April 25, 2011 under News, TSA |
Can you list every address you’ve lived at since birth? What about every employer – including the name of your supervisor and their phone number – you have ever had? Every school you attended, including address and phone number? If not, you might not be able to get a passport if the State Department has its way. And those are the easy questions on the newly proposed form DS-5513.
Here’s the justification for the new form as provided in the Federal Register filing:
The primary purpose for soliciting this information is to establish citizenship, identity, and eligibility for a U.S. Passport Book or Passport Card. The information may also be used in connection with issuing other travel documents or evidence of citizenship, and in furtherance of the Secretary’s responsibility for the protection of U.S. nationals abroad.
If you can demonstrate (arguably via a certified birth certificate) that you were born in the US then the above questions are the only ones you really need to complete. If not, however, the questionnaire gets way more detailed. Here are some of the specifics that are asked for:
- What type of document, if any, did your mother use to enter into the United States before your birth?
- Please describe the circumstances of your birth including the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present or in attendance at your birth.
- Was there any religious or institutional recording of your birth or event occurring around the time of birth? (Example: baptism, circumcision, confirmation or other religious ceremony. Please provide details including the name, location of the
institution, and date.)
They even ask for specific details regarding any medical professionals that may have been involved, including a history of appointment dates. Oh, and the mother’s profession, address and, because we don’t want to be particularly obvious that we’re discriminating against immigrants, "What type of document, if any, did your mother use to enter into the United States before your birth?"
In case you’re curious, they estimate that compiling all this information will take only 45 minutes on average. I only have to answer the easy questions and I’m not sure I can do it that quickly.
Sadly, this will almost certainly become the rule, just like all the other asinine things the government is doing to infringe upon our rights "out of an abundance of caution." Today is the last day to register a complaint to the appropriate officials. The easiest way to do so is to email GarciaAA@state.gov. You must include the DS form number (if applicable), information collection title, and OMB control number in any correspondence. For this particular abomination those details are DS-5513 and Biographical Questionnaire for U.S. Passport; there is no OMB control number currently assigned.
UPDATE (17:55 EDT 25 APR): This form is supposedly only to be used if the veracity of the initially supplied documentation is in doubt. So it probably won’t apply to everyone. Still, there is a TON of data in here way beyond what should be needed to establish citizenship and well beyond what the government should need from us.
Here’s the letter I’m sending. I encourage you to contact them as well. Oh, and the 60-day comment period started on February 24th so it is pretty much over so it is important to act quickly (i.e. TODAY) on this issue!
To: GarciaAA@state.gov
Subject: Comments on proposed rule for DS-5513 – Biographical Questionnaire for U.S. Passport
To whom it may concern:
I am writing to comment on the proposed rule change published in the Federal Register as Public Notice 7345 regarding form DS-5513 – Biographical Questionnaire for U.S. Passport; there is currently no OMB control number assigned to this document.
The proposed form is collecting an excessive amount of data, well beyond what is necessary to confirm citizenship and issue a passport for qualified individuals. The time burden suggested – an average of 45 minutes – is a gross underestimate of how long it will take to collect even the basic information; answering questions 5-12 will take significantly longer. As an adult in my 30s who is qualified to answer only the basic questions I found that it took me well over one hour to compile the information and it is still incomplete.
My schooling and job history have no bearing on my citizenship status, yet the form asks for full details of both. If I fail to provide it (and potentially if I miss something) the State Department can deny me a passport, even though I am a naturally born citizen.
The form show significant bias against home-birthed children, requiring them to complete extensive documentation as though they are an undocumented alien in this country. Similarly, the extensive details requested about the circumstances of the birth – names and phone numbers of everyone present, for example – are excessive and go well beyond what is necessary to document citizenship.
Travel is a wonderful thing. It provides education, experiences and perspective all at once, helping to better both the people doing the traveling as well as those whom they visit. It should be encouraged and facilitated by our government, not impeded. This form represents an excessive data collection against US citizens and is an undue burden for demonstrating citizenship. It is working against these goals, not towards them.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Wandering Aramean.
Posted by Seth on March 10, 2011 under Flying, News |
When the Department of Transportation announced in December 2009 that they were setting a hard limit on the amount of time flights could be delayed (the so-called "3-hour rule") before the operating carrier would be subject to significant fines there was quite the debate as to its potential impact. Many lauded the government for helping protect the passengers while others (self included) raised the point that more cancelled flights is worse for passengers than being stuck on the airplane but actually getting to the destination. Nearly a year into the new program the data available suggest that, so far, customers are losing far worse than expected from this policy.
With nine months of data available it is pretty clear that the number of 3-hour or longer tarmac delays is down. The DoT is making sure to trumpet that news and many media outlets are picking it up and running with it. They even have a pretty graph showing the impact of the rule:
Seems great, right? It is not.
Yes, there are fewer folks spending entirely too long in the plane on the way to wherever they are going, but that does not mean they are actually getting where they are going. It turns out that the number of flight cancelations has increased dramatically during this period as well, both as an absolute number and as a percentage of total scheduled flights. Actually, the latter is even worse as the total number of scheduled flights has decreased since the rule went into effect.
Here’s another look at the data, compiled based on the statistics published by the same federal agency that the DoT is using for the above numbers (click the images for the source data):
Yes, the variation in the size of the lines is much more dramatic in the bottom graph, but Marshall McLuhan would not be amused. It may look like the decrease in 3-hour delayed flights is more dramatic than the rise in cancelations, and in terms of percentages it is. But most significant is that the number of passengers displaced is MUCH higher because of the increased cancelations.
Oh, and the total number of flights operating each month was lower in 2010 than in 2009 so the fact that the cancelation numbers are higher in 6/10 samples and essentially the same in 3/10 is not a particularly comforting thought at all. That’s 90% of the sample since the rule went into effect where the percentage of flights canceled was higher than the previous year.
Load factors are running at or near all-time highs. This means that once a flight is canceled it is even harder to accommodate the affected passengers as there simply are no empty seats to place them in. So increasing the number of canceled flights certainly doesn’t seem to be the way to solve the problem of inconvenienced customers.
It should be pointed out that correlation certainly does not equal causation. Maybe there is another reason that there were so many flights canceled. But there is weather every year and the impact of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption was mostly confined to April 2010. Ironically that was the one month of the past 10 that had a lower cancelation rate.
Penalizing lots of customers for the sake of a select few is a bad way to operate. The Department of Transportation needs to take a hard look at these numbers and reconsider this policy. Delays and cancelations suck for everyone. The government should not be in the position of inducing them.
A bit more coverage of this phenomena can be found here, too
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Posted by Seth on September 21, 2010 under frequent flyer, News, points |
So, just how much extra can you expect to pay on top of your fare to travel? While it depends on the airline you’re flying the number is about 6% on average. Sortof.
Tracking the reality of airline pricing is, at best, a gray magic sort of scenario. There are quarterly reports, annual reports and a myriad of different acronyms and categories of statistics reported. Some of the reports are required by the Department of Transportation and then aggregated and distributed by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Even those numbers are incomplete, however, because the reporting requirements simply have not kept pace with the flood of fees that the airlines are coming up with. So all the numbers are soft. The BTS states it rather clearly:
Revenue from seating assignments and on-board sales of food, drink, pillows, blankets, entertainment, or any other ancillary items are reported as Transport Related Revenue and cannot be identified separately.
So they cannot identify all those details but that doesn’t mean that the details are trivial. The Q2 2010 report was just released and the numbers it documents are rather impressive. The industry realize $2.1 billion in “ancillary revenue” in Q2 2010. Of that nearly $900MM of the revenue came from checked baggage fees. Another $600MM came from reservation change fees with the balance attributed to standby fees, pet carriage charges and sales of frequent flyer miles to business partners.
Putting the number in context, the total industry profits from the reporting carriers during the time period was a hair over $3 billion. If there was any doubt about just how important these fees are to the profitability of the airlines this report (along with the past few that have told similar stories) should put said doubt to rest.
As for which airlines are seeing the bulk of the profit from these fees, the usual suspects are pretty well represented. As the largest carrier in the world (for a couple more weeks) Delta is atop the list for total ancillary revenue. The soon to be largest carriers, a combined United Airlines/Continental at about half the total revenue that Delta realized in the quarter ($681MM v. $340MM combined). US Airways is holding strong in its position near the top of the list which is quite impressive, especially considering how much smaller than the other airlines it is.
There’s Southwest, coming in at $200MM in ancillary fees collected in the quarter. Sure, the may not charge for checked bags (and they love to publicize that in their commercials) but their customers are still paying plenty of fees, enough to see them above the industry average in terms of revenue from fees compared to total operating revenue (6.4% to the industry average of 6%).
And, just to make sure that they’re on the top of some list, there’s Spirit Air. The carrier realized 24.2% of its revenue in the quarter from ancillary charges. Ouch.
Of course, if the total cost is the same then no big deal but the numbers generally are not well published or particularly clear for customers meaning that the total travel cost is often not known by passengers until the trip is over, after it is too late to make a fair fare comparison. There are a few folks out there trying to help level the playing field (check out TruPrice for a pretty solid example) but it is still nearly impossible for customers effectively compare prices in advance.
Lots more numbers in the report, including fuel costs (figure ~$3.5 cents per seat mile flown, so that 2500 mile trip from New York City to Los Angeles costs the airline about $85 in fuel for your seat. Kindof hard to believe that they still sell the seats for not much more than that so often.
Tags: Continental, Delta, DoT, fees, frequent flyer, merger, points, Southwest Airline, Spirit Air, United, US Air
Posted by Seth on August 28, 2010 under News |
In a move that was only surprising for how quickly it happened, the Department of Justice has stated that they are satisfied with the terms of the proposed merger between Continental and United Airlines. The new carrier will be the largest and there was some concern that various regulatory agencies would place undue barriers in the place of the merger. Given the conditions that the DoJ assigned, however, that seems to have been false fear.
The only significant condition that the DoJ applied was that a number of slots – amounting to 18 daily round trip flights – be ceded to another carrier in the Newark market. That number roughly represents the number of flights that United operates from Newark today. Given the relative domination of the Newark market by Continental today (64% of enplanements are on Continental or Continental Express), this requirement does not seem unreasonable. While Cleveland and Houston both have a higher percentage of service operated by Continental, the New York City market is apparently in greater need of competition. Plus there is the fact that Newark is slot-restricted while the other airports are not.
Those slots will be granted to a new entrant in the Newark market: Southwest Airlines. The carrier will be leasing the slots from the combined United/Continental and is expected to begin operations in March 2011. The full complement of slots will be transferred by June 2011. They have not yet announced destinations for the 18 daily flights.
Unlike the recently proposed Delta/US Airways slot swap, the Continental/Southwest deal was welcomed by the DoJ. It seems to reason that having a significant number of slots go to a single stakeholder, particularly a new entrant, is a better competitive solution than spreading a limited number of slots across a broad collection of carriers, effectively limiting any one of them from providing significant service and competition.
With this approval the number of potential road blocks for the proposed merger diminishes quite significantly. There are still potential union issues and the Department of Transportation will eventually need to rule on a combined operating certificate. And there is the pesky little issue of the stockholders needing to approve the merger, but that seems quite likely given the large number of institutional shareholders. At this point things appear to be progressing rapidly towards this deal being done somewhere around Halloween, if not sooner.
Speaking of the union issues, it is no real surprise that the pilots’ unions have brought up the scope clause in their initial negotiations with the companies. What is somewhat surprising is just how aggressive they are being with their stance. Currently the United and Continental pilots have differing scope clauses for their operations. With United the limit for regional operations permits the operation of 70 seat aircraft by regional partners, Continental has a more restrictive 59 seat limit in the agreement with its pilots. The initial stance of the combined union is that there should be zero flights operated by regional carriers. Yeah, a bit extreme. They’ve made it clear from the initial announcement that they’re looking to be as restrictive as possible on this and the initial position is not too surprising as a jumping off point for the negotiations. Still, it is a bit unreasonable to expect that will actually be the ultimate agreement.
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Posted by Seth on August 27, 2010 under News |
One of the conditions handed down by the European and US authorities for the approval of the American Airlines – British Airways anti-trust immunity application was the ceding of slots for service between London and certain US airports. Delta has decided to take advantage of this opportunity. They have applied to the appropriate authorities to serve both Boston and Miami from London’s Heathrow airport. Based on the limited number of slots at Heathrow currently held by the SkyTeam alliance, it appears likely that the application will be approved. If awarded the new service Delta would operate 10 daily frequencies from Heathrow to 6 different US gateways:
- New York JFK: 3x daily
- Boston: 2x daily
- Miami: 1x daily
- Minneapolis: 1x daily
- Atlanta: 11x weekly
- Detroit: 10x weekly
In addition to the new London service, Delta is also looking to beef up its presence in the Raleigh Durham market. Noting a significant increase in traffic from RDU this year, the carrier is adding 14 daily frequencies, increasing service by more than 25%. Included in these additions is service to three cities not currently served by Delta from RDU of which two have never seen Delta service from RDU. Additionally, Delta has recently opened a SkyClub lounge in RDU, demonstrating their commitment to the market.
Of course, it is entirely possible that part of the traffic increase is based on the fact that Delta has been running a rather significant promotion for flights from RDU and that when the promo ends the volume will decrease as well. Then again, maybe the fact that the region is pretty stable is really what is driving the expansion. Delta will be competing against Southwest on three of the routes. A number of the new frequencies are on the somewhat miserable CRJ-100 aircraft so that might not be so great either, but who knows.
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Posted by Seth on August 5, 2010 under News |
After taking quite a beating in the press (including here), Southwest gave up on trying to use their PR machine to convince the world that we were all misinterpreting their Contract of Carriage. They finally got the lawyers to actually fix it.
The latest version of the CoC – updated 28 July 2010 – now reflects the following in their definitions section:
Force Majeure Event means any event outside of Carrier’s control, including, without limitation, acts of God, meteorological events, such as storms, rain, wind, fire, fog, flooding, earthquakes, haze, or volcanic eruption. It also includes, without limitation, government action, disturbances or potentially volatile international conditions, civil commotions, riots, embargoes, wars, or hostilities, whether actual, threatened, or reported, strikes, work stoppage, slowdown, lockout or any other labor related dispute involving or affecting Carrier’s service, mechanical difficulties by entities other than Carrier, Air Traffic Control, the inability to obtain fuel, airport gates, labor, or landing facilities for the flight in question or any fact not reasonably foreseen, anticipated or predicted by Carrier.
The line about mechanical failures has changed from “mechanical difficulties” to “mechanical difficulties by entities other than Carrier.” Just a couple words but they make all the difference when it comes to actually doing right by the customer.
It is worth noting that Southwest is still the only carrier that has such a clause in their CoC but at least now it isn’t quite so badly stacked against the customer. They did not relent on their decision to restrict travel funds, but such a change was not expected as they are doing what they can to increase revenue and close loopholes in their policies.
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Posted by Seth on July 25, 2010 under News |
Airlines generally stack the deck against their customers. Most rules are written such that should anything go wrong, the airline will likely benefit more than the passengers do. In some cases this is reasonable – an airline certainly isn’t responsible for delays caused when weather happens – but in many cases it is not. Historically airlines have accepted that maintenance of their aircraft is something that they are responsible for and that a mechanical failure of a plane is something that they should have avoided in the first place, leaving them on the hook to care for passengers during any associated delay or cancelation.
Southwest has decided to push the envelope on this issue, however, declaring that mechanical failures of their aircraft are force majeure events in their newly revised Contract of Carriage (CoC):
Force Majeure Event means any event outside of Carrier’s control, including, without limitation, acts of God, meteorological events, such as storms, rain, wind, fire, fog, flooding, earthquakes, haze, volcanic eruption or any other event, including, without limitation, government action, disturbances or potentially volatile international conditions, civil commotions, riots, embargoes, wars, or hostilities, whether actual, threatened, or reported, strikes, work stoppage, slowdown, lockout or any other labor related dispute involving or affecting Carrier’s service, mechanical difficulties, Air Traffic Control, the inability to obtain fuel, labor or landing facilities for the flight in question or any fact not reasonably foreseen, anticipated or predicted by Carrier.
Tucked away at the bottom there is the phrase “mechanical difficulties.” Having those two words in this section of the CoC essentially means that Southwest has significantly fewer obligations to their customers now should there be an aircraft breakdown. Southwest is the only major US-based carrier to include that phrase in the force majeure section of their CoC. Maybe this only applies if the whole fleet is affected – think DOT maintenance directive or something similar – but that certainly is not clear from the way the Contract is written. Moreover, there are a number of seemingly conflicting sections in the CoC that Southwest may or may not hold responsibility in the same instance. These gray areas are dangerous territory for customers.
Combined with the move to limit the use of travel credits for canceled reservations, the new Southwest CoC takes a significant step backwards in customer flexibility and care. The airline has made a name for itself in many ways because of the reputation it carries for customer care. These changes portend a very unfortunate change in such customer-focused service.
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