— Washington In response to months of widespread airline cancellations and delays, the Department of Transportation has developed a customer support dashboard to assist travelers in advance of the Labor Day holiday.
The dashboard displays the types of guarantees, refunds, and compensation offered by the major domestic airlines in the event of flight delays or cancellations. It is intended to enable travelers to comparison shop and favor airlines who offer the best compensation.
After a summer blighted by flight cancellations and delays, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has publicly challenged the major airlines to improve service and transparency. The dashboard is part of a prolonged pressure campaign. As summer traffic recovered to levels comparable to those before the coronavirus epidemic, airlines struggled to keep up, with huge cancellations attributed to staffing shortages, notably among pilots.
“Passengers deserve transparency and clarity regarding what to expect from an airline in the event of a flight cancellation or disruption,” said Buttigieg in a statement released on Wednesday. According to him, the new tool would assist travelers in “simply comprehending their rights, comparing airline policies, and making educated judgments.”
The dashboard examines the rules of all the main domestic airlines, such as which offer meals for delays over three hours and which offer free rebooking on the same or alternative airlines. It focuses on what it terms “controllable” cancellations or delays, such as those caused by mechanical faults, staffing shortages, or cleaning, refuelling, or baggage handling delays. Invalid are delays or cancellations caused by inclement weather or security concerns.
The Transportation Department hopes that the dashboard would spur competition among carriers to provide the most openness and the strongest customer protections.
“Carriers welcome efforts to streamline travel policies, explain existing procedures, and promote traveler transparency. Airlines in the United States publish their customer service strategies on their respective websites “Airlines for America, an industry trade group, said in a statement: The new dashboard “provides travelers with an additional access point to this information.”
FlightAware reports that so far this year, airlines have canceled over 146,000 flights, or 2.6% of all flights, and nearly 1.3 million flights have been delayed. Compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic, the rate of cancellations has increased by around one-third, while the rate of delays has increased by approximately one-fourth.
Federal officials have attributed many of the interruptions to airlines’ understaffing, which pushed workers to leave once the pandemic began. The airlines have responded by blaming air traffic controller staffing issues at the Federal Aviation Administration.