Biden Administration Mulling Transparency in Disclosure Norms for Air Ticket Fares

 


It is quite a common issue that the air travellers complain of being charged unreasonably by the travel agencies. You can see a number complaints and negative reviews on the different social media and review collection sites wherein people have shared their bad experiences with the travel agencies and even with the airline companies. US DOT has recently moved proposal to Biden Administration which aims to strengthen consumer protection.

It proposes that airlines make full disclosure of their fee information. This information would be available for customers before doing airline reservations so that they can take more informed decisions and save money. This will also stem the number of complaints which the government receives on fleecing of money.

The new set of proposals will be applicable for both the US carriers and the foreign carriers. Further, the scope will be enlarged to include ticket agents and third-party sellers. The fee of baggage, cancellations, itinerary changes and other aspects will be covered under the ambit of these proposals.

Besides focusing on the disclosure norms, the airlines will also be required to treat the passengers in a better way. Very recently, a new platform has been introduced by the Department of Transportation which shows what the passengers are owed in the event of cancellations or delays of flights. Prior to this, it shall be noted that none of the major airline companies in US provided meals or a hotel in the event of delay or cancellation of flights. Passengers were largely rendered helpless or are on their own in the event of this hapless attitude of the airlines.

There is a counterview to this set of proposals as well. The industry experts opine that implementing these measures will increase the fares which might not be liked by the passengers.

These proposals are in the nature of similar steps taken by the Biden Administration for the Credit Card companies and also on the Internet Service providers which has helped save billions of dollars annually by the consumers. The US administration wants to implement the same intent in the airline industry as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Shall You Make Searches for Cheap Flight Tickets Online from Multiple Sources?

Image
Everyone wants to have the lowest fare air tickets. Whether flying domestic or international, and in economy, business or first class, passengers do search for the cheapest fares. While this little bit of research is important to find the fares, it is also of significance that you make searches on different websites. Why? The answer to this has much to do with the way the aggregators have the contracts from the airlines and how these are distributed to the agencies. If you have made searches for cheap flight tickets online , you would have found that certain flights are common on most of the pages whereas certain others are present on some and missing on others. So, the number of contracts available with a particular website might be limited. Since these contracts are fetched by the API calls from the providers , different API providers might be having different contractors. The limitations can also be imposed at the level of the agency itself. It might not want to show all the con...
Read more

Importance of Customer Service Dashboards Of the US Department of Transport (DOT)

Image
  Airlines describe in detail their policy when there is flight cancellation or delay by the airline itself. When these changes are caused by the airline itself, this is technically called controllable changes. Even when the policy is well defined and the same is available on public space, be it website or the e-ticket, there is always a complaint that the airlines do not follow it. Of course, there have also been instances that the passengers have not been aware of their rights when there are cancellations and delays. Now, in order to streamline the flow of information and to ensure that the passengers do get all this information, DOT decided to launch the various dashboards on its own website. These would provide all the required information pertaining to a specific service area and the passengers can easily view this information. DOT had launched one Customer Service Cancellation and Delay Dashboard in summer of 2022. This dashboard was meant to inform the passengers about w...
Read more

‘Green’ Airlines Tickets and Customer Perception

Image
 Of late, you would have seen that the airlines are beginning to offer a totally new set of fares, called the ‘Green’ fares. These fares are the outcome of the efforts made by the airline companies towards moving to green fuels and helping support projects working for zero CO2 emissions. It is common knowledge that aviation industry is responsible for pollution of the environment since it makes use of the aviation grade kerosene for propulsion. With the development of the alternative sustainable fuel options, called SAF in short, this issue is sought to be addressed. However, due to the level of technological development and extent of infrastructure developed, which has kept price of air tickets at high level, the airlines have not yet moved to 100% usage of this fuel in all the flights. Airlines, however, started collecting funds from its customers, as a part of the air ticket price, to fund the projects that are working for achieving zero carbon foot print in their processes. W...
Read more