There’s no denying the recent string of high-profile episodes of airlines mistreating their customers– whether it’s forcing passengers to spend nine hours in a grounded plane, booting off beautiful girls for their revealing clothes (the nerve!), or inadvertently boarding an 83-year-old woman on a flight to Puerto Rico instead of her actual destination, New York.
After every such incident, it seems someone writes a blog post or an op-ed about how a “Passenger Bill of Rights” would prevent similar misbehavior in the future. But would it?
Not according to George Petsikas, the president of Canada’s National Airlines Council. He says that enacting a such a law would cause airfares to skyrocket since under Canada’s version of the Bill of Rights, airlines would be fined for, among other things, leaving passengers in the plane on the tarmac for over one hour ($500 per person per hour), as well as failing to notify passengers of delays in a timely manner ($1,000 per instance).
Although I am loath to agree with the spokesman for the big, bad, evil airlines, it does seem as if the proposed fines are excessive, and that these costs would merely be passed on to the consumers. I have no doubt that, when airlines “strand” people on the runways for ninety minutes waiting for take-off, they’re actually doing their best to get the plane in the air. Sitting on the tarmac for an extended period of time is inconvenient, frustrating, and uncomfortable, but it is also usually not the airline’s fault. (Nine hours is another story altogether.)
What is needed is not governmental micro-management of the airlines– fifty minutes on the tarmac is okay, but sixty minutes is not– but rather a minimal set of standards of behavior which airlines must live up to. For example, an airline may not allow passengers to wait on the tarmac for over three hours. An airline may not bump a passenger from a flight without offering them reasonable compensation.
When you start fining airlines for every little offense, they will simply raise ticket prices. In effect, we’ll be taking money out of our left pockets to buy the airline tickets, and putting it into our right pockets to compensate ourselves for the airline’s misbehavior.