And you thought last year was bad.
By now, pretty much everybody probably knows how Southwest Airlines (LUV) -) got its wings clipped by the U.S. Department of Transportation to the tune of $140 million for its 10-day service meltdown during the 2022 holiday season.
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This was the largest civil penalty ever handed down by the D.O.T., but President and CEO Bob Jordan said the airline has put in place “significant investments and initiatives that accelerate operational resiliency, enhance cross-team collaboration and bolster overall preparedness for winter operations.”
And Treasury Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that he doesn't anticipate any more big problems from the industry he oversees.
Well, it seems that airline passengers have a different view of the situation, according to a recent survey, which found that complaints against U.S. airlines will break another record in 2023.
Complaints against U.S. airlines soar
Data analyzed by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that following a record-breaking 2022, complaints against airlines surged 109% year-over-year from January through May, a period when the number of air travelers increased 14%.
In fact, U.S. PIRG said, the volume this year has so overwhelmed D.O.T.’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection that officials claimed they were unable to tally and release complaint data this year on anything close to their normal schedule, which is generally within six weeks after the end of a month.
For the first five months of 2023, travelers filed 38,135 complaints against U.S. and foreign airlines, travel agents and tour operators, up 68% from a year ago.
Of those, 26,312 were against U.S. airlines, which is more than double from the year ago total.
To give you an idea of just how big this number is, U.S. PIRG said that until 2020, D.O.T. had tallied more than 20,000 complaints against U.S. airlines only one time for the entire year, which was in 2000.
Ergo, the complaints filed against U.S. airlines for five months this year topped the 12-month totals for any year before 2020.
Nearly 35% of complaints were about flight problems, meaning cancellations, delays or missed connections. Refunds – or the lack of – made up an additional 20% of complaints.
Cancellations down, delays down
Complaints about lost or damaged baggage or wheelchairs came in third, at nearly 16% of complaints, which was similar to what went on throughout 2022.
This news could be particularly dispiriting to travelers at this time of the year, seeing as how the Transportation Safety Authority said last month that it was expecting this holiday season to be the busiest ever.
On the plus side, cancellations January through September improved significantly compared with the same period last year, dropping from 2.8% of flights to 1.6%.
But delays are a bigger problem than in 2022, particularly when they cause passengers to miss connecting flights.
And it’s not your imagination: Flights really were more crowded. The number of flights January through September increased by 4%, but passenger volume increased by 11%.
"Complaints give regulators and travelers a window into the biggest problems, and the best and worst airlines," U.S. PIRG said.
"The question now is – in this fourth consecutive year of airlines angering customers in numbers never experienced before 2020 – what will regulators and lawmakers do about issues that clearly need to be addressed?"
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