Complaints about U.S. airlines have jumped more than 29 percent this year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, with big increases in canceled flights and baggage problems.
So far this year, US Airways has the most complaints per passenger, while Southwest Airlines has the fewest. United Airlines was 11th of 19 U.S. airlines, and Frontier Airlines wasn’t ranked. The biggest complaint has been flight problems, which includes cancellations, delays and missed connections.
In October, for example, the number of canceled flights increased nearly 52 percent to 10,475 from 6,895 canceled trips in October 2004. Mishandled baggage reports increased as well, rising nearly 22 percent to 239,452 for the month, compared with 196,847 mishandled bags a year earlier.
The Transportation Department says complaints are up this year because more people are flying. Through October, U.S. airlines boarded 496.2 million passengers this year, up 3 percent from 481.2 million in the first 10 months of 2004, according to the DOT. Massive airline schedule changes have also added disruption, leading to more gripes.
The DOT also is receiving more complaints about unsatisfactory responses to complaints from airlines, a senior official says. Financial strains have left fewer workers to respond to complaints, and airlines are perhaps less generous at doling out compensation to customers.
For travelers, all this raises the question: Do complaints ever result in change? To those who register complaints with airlines or the DOT, it can sometimes seem that their protests and problems fall on deaf ears.
“All I got was some bozo piece of literature back that didn’t respond to my letter at all,” says John Pitney, who endured a US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles with all four toilets inoperable and an indifferent crew.
That was in 2003, and he’s still angry about it.
Airlines say they do take complaints to heart and try to track down poorly behaving employees or recurring problems. Complaints often get routed to managers, supervisors and senior executives.
And the DOT says that while it doesn’t have much consumer-protection clout under federal law, officials do look for trends and pressure airline executives about bad service at monthly meetings focusing on complaints.
Frequent-flier status and a high ticket price help determine how customers get treated at many airlines. With either, a customer has a better chance at accommodation. For those who rarely fly the airline and have a cheap ticket, it’s often a different story.
That’s what Amy Klein discovered when she booked cheap tickets to a family reunion last year on United Airlines, only to get a call about three weeks before her departure notifying her that she had been moved to a later flight because of a scheduling change. That meant she’d miss a family dinner, but when she called to reschedule, an agent told her the flight she had booked still existed under a different flight number. Seats were reassigned by fare class, an agent told her, and since her ticket was the cheapest, she got bumped.
Furious, the Menlo Park., Calif., investment adviser complained to United and DOT and got form-letter responses from both. Of United’s response, Klein says: “The response was no response. It didn’t answer the situation.”
DOT sent a note saying her complaint had been tallied.
United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski says the airline tries to customize letters and didn’t intend to send Klein a form letter, but the company does use “consistent language about our policy to ensure our messages are clear and concise every time.”
United encourages customer feedback, Urbanski says. Vouchers toward the purchase of future travel are handed out based on the cause and severity of the complaint, as well as “how loyal the customer is to United and how much the customer paid for his or her ticket,” she says.
