The Department of Transportation (DOT) has improved their website and has packed it with consumer-friendly information all in one place.
The new website has a process for consumers who want to file complaints about airline service and safety. The new process allows phone calls to a Washington, DC, number, letters to the Aviation Consumer Protection Division and now an online form to report complaints.
And that’s just the beginning.
Hallelujah! With this improved online complaint system, more passengers will be able to easily file their comments. I’ll bet an iPhone app will soon appear to make it even easier for travelers to send complaints to DOT from their mobile devices.
The new website launched by the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement division of the DOT is a big change and makes life easier for airline consumers. It is gratifying to see these kinds of improvements for consumers coming out of Washington.
This is the homepage interface:
Besides the section for filing consumer complaints, the DOT site includes the Air Travel Consumer Report that provides monthly data about on-time arrivals and departures, income from fees and baggage handling data, plus more.
Consumers can also find DOT rules, guidelines and enforcement actions, aviation safety and security documents, DOT travel publications and news about airline bankruptcies.
Other features are travel tips and a list of contact information for each airline’s customer relations manager.
The new DOT, amazingly, also has instructions for filing actions against the airlines in small claims court.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
Unfortunately, the form on the DOT Web site still channels complaints into a slush pile of reports of customer service “problems”. These are counted and categorized, the statistics are made public, and they are referred back to the airlines themselves to respond to (or not). But the DOT chooses only a handful of them, at its discretion, to treat them as complaints of violations of the Federal consumer fraud law.
What the DOT form doesn’t allow you to do, or say how to do, is to make a formal *complaint* that the DOT has to acknowledge and respond to as a complaint of illegal airline behavior. To do that, you have to write a letter to DOT, and state specifically that you are making a complaint of violation of title 49 U.S. Code, section 41712 (“unfair and deceptive practices”), and explicitly request that the DOT open an investigation and take enforcement action.
If you do this, the DOT has to assign your complaint a docket number and respond to it in writing. There’s a good example of a detailed complaint of this sort here and more background about that case, and what is shows about the DOT’s (lack of) diligence, here.