Travel News

The DOT’s New Air Travel Rules Explained

Locations in this article:  Madrid, Spain

The DOT's New Air Travel Rules ExplainedConfused by the new airlines rules set by the DOT?

Peter sat down to talk with The Wall Street Journal’s Scott McCartney about how it will affect consumers.

Plus, the travel experts discuss the never-ending issue of airfare fluctuation and how consumers can seek out the best deals.

Peter Greenberg: The new DOT rules are very interesting considering they were able to accomplish what Congress and state legislatures have not been able to do.

Scott McCartney: They were, and even more interesting, they forced the airlines to do things in terms of common-sense business that they should have done a long time ago. However, I’m not convinced that travelers are going to see a whole lot of benefit out of this. I think adding international airlines to the tarmac delay rule provides more protection. That’s probably going to help cut down on some of those really horrendous entrapment aboard planes. The baggage rule got a lot of attention, but it only applies to bags that are lost, not bags that are delayed, and it can take weeks for an airline to declare a bag lost. You go through a huge hassle of fighting with the airline over the value of the contents of the bag. The airline unilaterally decides how much your suit was worth on the day it was lost, not what it costs to replace it. At the end of all that process the $25 bag fee is the least of your worries. But as a matter of principle, airlines should have been refunding it to begin with.

Old Suitcases - DOT's new lost baggage rulesPG: I still think it raises a legal question that if you contract for a service and you don’t get it, you’re entitled to a refund immediately.

SM: So the problem is, the airline says OK, the bag was lost. The government says therefore the airlines has to refund the checked-bag fee. The airline says if the bag gets to you four days later, or a week after you get home the airline delivered the bag. So from a legal standpoint the airline says, hey we didn’t guarantee that it was going to be on the same flight with you; we got it to you eventually.

PG: Isn’t it interesting that they used to say, after 9/11, that if your bag wasn’t on the flight you were on they would take the bags off. They were doing positive matching of bags to passengers. I don’t think they’re doing that anymore.

SM: No, because they can screen the bags. If you run the bag through the bomb detection machine then you don’t really care what passenger it is attached to.

PG: I’m telling you, there is no common sense anymore. Speaking of no common sense, you did a great story this week in The Wall Street Journal about airfare bait and switch. You go online to find a fare, see something you like and when you click to buy it, it’s suddenly not available.

Check out Peter’s report on the subject for CBS: Passenger Rights On The CBS Evening News

How much are you paying for that seat? Airfare bait-and-switchSM: This has been a problem that people have complained about for years, but what attracted me about it now is that I think it is happening more and more often. The online search engine companies are getting fancier technology. Some of them are trying to mimic airline pricing systems and inventory systems. They are, in a sense, guessing at fares. They’re under such pressure to deliver search results so quickly to you that they’re using old data, using estimates, and using all kinds of things except actually pinging the airline and seeing what the fare actually is. So it’s not until you click through to actually buy the fare that they confirm what the price is.

PG: Something happened to me about two months ago which I found truly interesting because it was such a big disparity in fare. I was trying to get somebody from New York to Washington, D.C., on the shuttle flight. Each airline that flies that shuttle, US Airways and Delta, must have been signaling each other because they had the exact same fare. It was $309 each way. You couldn’t buy a cheaper fare if you tried. Then I looked at all the fares for all the hours of the day they flew, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and it was $309 for both airlines for every single flight. Then I went on Orbitz and checked out the 8 a.m. flight that everybody else told me was $309 and they had it for $53. The point is that obviously they were operating on inventory that the other airlines didn’t want them to have.

SM: I’m not quite sure how that would all work. Eventually Orbitz has to go through a global distribution system into the airline inventory system. But sometimes there are quirks and when you log on, the airline obviously knows who you are and knows your company so it may have been that a company contract came into play. I mean the complexity of this stuff is just enormous.

Find out how to take advantage of some of the system’s quirks with: Best Day of the Week To Buy Cheap Tickets.

PG: I encourage people to be comparison shoppers and don’t just go to the airline Web site. Go to every single site you can.

Comparison shopping is key to cheap ticketsSM: I’m totally with you on comparing lots of different sites. I think it’s important. Expedia told me that 5 percent of their fares actually change on people when they search. The other Web sites wouldn’t even disclose what the error rate, or I call it the “wait and switch rate.” But 1 out of 20 for Expedia, that just seemed huge to me. So I think to some extent you have to do some clicking through to see what the actual price is these days.

PG: Last week I was trying to book somebody to Madrid and I did it online. What was interesting I had 24 hours to buy it, but I forgot. When I called the airline to book that fare, they said, that fare was already canceled, but it’s now dropped by $180.

SM: This stuff is happening by the microsecond. As you know, airlines load 20-plus different fares for different flights, and then they manage the inventory in what they call buckets. They’ll make the cheapest fare available and then all of a sudden there will be a couple of purchases or connecting flights will affect the capacity on a certain flight. So they’ll bump the price up just by closing out the cheap buckets and moving people into the higher buckets. It goes the other way too. By shopping you may have convinced the airline there was higher demand for that flight to Madrid. Then when your flight canceled out the inventory system, all the computer algorithms said whoops, demand dropped we better lower that price.

PG: Amazing. It’s the world’s biggest crapshoot.

SM: It really is. I think it’s ridiculous in a lot of ways. The complexity makes the consumer crazy. The notion that a ticket to Madrid can change every couple hours or even seconds is a silly way to run the business in many ways. I think airlines do themselves a disservice by making it so hard to use their own product.

PG: And bottom line is, if worst comes to worst, always talk to a human being. They might actually have inventory the Web sites don’t have.

By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio.

Related Links on PeterGreenberg.com: