After a summer of flight cancellations, flight delays and post-pandemic disruptions, the U.S Department of Transportation (USDOT) finally issued an ultimatum to airlines in light of its recent Air Travel Consumer Report (ATCR). The report put into perspective an alarming trend that travelers, flight staff and industry analysts have been aware of for months if not years: consumer complaints are alarmingly high and have been growing at a steady pace. Complaints are not only up 269% compared to June 2019 levels, but even just over the summer months complaints rose by a considerable 34.9% between May and June 2022.
To put it simply, the USDOT is not happy with this trend, telling U.S. airlines that they need to come up with their own improvements for customer service or the agency will be forced to proceed a federal rule change. Essentially, the USDOT is threatening regulation if airlines can’t get their act together.
Voicing his concern, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that this level of customer service is “unacceptable” and that regardless of if flight issues are self-imposed or unavoidable industry adversities, airlines have to be more transparent.
“You’ve got to make it easier for passengers to understand their rights and support passengers when they experience delays or cancellations,” Buttigieg said in an interview on NBC’s TODAY.
In the ATCR, one of the key findings that caused the USDOT to threaten intervention was the various factors behind the complaints surge. Flight problems proved to be the highest-represented category of complaints received in June 2022. Of the 5,862 complaints received, 1,686 (28.8%) concerned flight cancellations, delays, or other deviations from airlines’ schedules. Of the nearly 6,000 complaints in June 2022, 3,382 (57.7%) were against U.S. airlines.
After Pandemic Furloughs and Layoffs, Lack of Personnel Impacts Flight Cancellations
At the center of these alarming figures were the consequences of both a nationwide and a self-inflicted staffing crisis, which continue to burden airline carriers who tried to cut costs during the pandemic and now seek to capitalize on rising travel numbers.
“I think one of the places the airline executives probably pushed it was that they wanted to fly more of their schedule, as much of their schedule as possible, in the summer months, in that constricted 2Q and 3Q period. And again, they did it with staff that a lot of times was just being rehired and retrained,” said George Ferguson, senior aerospace & airline analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.
Pressured early in the pandemic to take buyouts and/or consider early retirement, flight attendants, senior pilots and other employees were ushered out of the industry as major airlines anticipated shrinking demand and long recovery period. Mid-pandemic calculations from Bloomberg estimated around 400,000 global airline jobs were “lost or at risk” due to pandemic disruptions.
Looking at total airline employment data in the U.S., pre-pandemic employment figures reached a peak of 753,382 jobs in February 2020. It took until May of 2022 to bring airline employment to new heights, hitting more than 760,000 jobs. Though full-time employment for airlines has more than recovered, part-time employment in the industry remains thousands of jobs below pre-pandemic levels.
“I think what it resulted in was a very fragile system. So then when normal interrupters like weather or technology glitches and failures enter into the system inevitably. In normal times, they have a smaller effect. When we have such a fragile system with planes missing with people missing from the system. Then when these normal interrupters happen, they crash and they lead to the weekends that we had Father’s Day and earlier in the summer, where we had these air-mageddon weekends with one third of flights affected,” said James Ferrara, founder & CEO of InteleTravel.
Airlines’…
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