Airlines have been ordered by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to pay more than $600 million in refunds for canceled or changed flights since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Monday, the DOT announced that six airlines have collectively paid more than a half billion dollars to hundreds of thousands of passengers for canceled or significantly changed flights.
Our message to the traveling public is DOT has your back. Thanks to DOT efforts more than $600 million in refunds returned to airline passengers who were owed a refund due to a flight cancelation or significant change. https://t.co/Sfa0Emyd2n
— TransportationGov (@USDOT) November 14, 2022
“When a flight gets canceled, passengers seeking refunds should be paid back promptly. Whenever that doesn’t happen, we will act to hold airlines accountable on behalf of American travelers and get passengers their money back.” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “A flight cancellation is frustrating enough, and you shouldn’t also have to haggle or wait months to get your refund.”
The department is also issuing $7.25 million in fines against the six airlines for the “extreme delays in providing those refunds to passengers,” bringing the total assessed fines for 2022 to $8.1 million.
“[T]he department’s expectation that when Americans buy a ticket on an airline, we expect to get to our destination safely reliably and affordably. And our job at DOT is to hold airlines accountable for these expectations, many of which are a matter of law and regulation,” he continued.
This comes a month after the DOT said that most of the consumer complaints it received in August concerned refunds.
Blane Workie, DOT assistant general counsel for the Office of Aviation Consumer Protection, said that the process of getting airlines to issue refunds varied by airline. Frontier Airlines, for example, changed its definition of “significant schedule change” in March 2020.
“In essence, they were retroactively applying a more stringent rule to consumers, and I can certainly say that Frontier would not have provided these refunds to tens of thousands of passengers if DOT had not been involved,” Workie said.
As part of the process, the department required that Frontier provide the necessary refunds or inform all those passengers on how to obtain refunds in case they needed to fill out forms.
When asked if this would serve as a deterrent to airlines, Buttigieg responded that the “overall objective is to make sure passengers get their money back.”
“It shouldn’t take an enforcement action from the US Department of Transportation to get airlines to pay refunds that they’re required to pay. And so, I have asked the team to undertake an exercise to make sure that the fines are calibrated to deter this in the future and save passengers a lot of time and save everybody a lot,” he said.
