DOT slammed for handling of airline complaints

WASHINGTON -- Airline passenger complaints to the U.S. Department of Transportation are rolling in by the thousands this year, but fliers waiting for government help may be disappointed.

This year, the DOT's enforcement office has closed just 25 consumer protection investigations with so-called consent orders, or settlement agreements, with the violators. As part of those orders, DOT has assessed $1.15 million in fines against airlines and other aviation-related firms for a variety of violations, including deceptive practices and failing to properly accommodate disabled passengers on planes.

Meanwhile, the DOT through September has logged 8,612 passenger complaints, up 70% for the same period last year. Those complaints — about delayed and canceled flights, lost luggage, bad customer service, refunds never made and other problems — doubled during the heavy travel months of July and August from a year earlier.

Critics, including past DOT officials, say the department's consumer protection enforcement is simply not good enough. The DOT should be more aggressive as a consumer watchdog, taking up more complaints and levying steeper fines on airlines, they say.

"The passenger should be the No. 1 priority," says former DOT inspector general Ken Mead, now special counsel at a Washington, D.C., law firm. "This office needs to be considerably more aggressive in the consumer-protection area."

DOT Inspector General Calvin Scovel testified before Congress in April that the DOT "needs to improve its oversight of consumer protection laws."

'Budgetary buzz saw'

The department's enforcement office has a full-time staff of 31, down from 41 in 2004. That year, the agency closed 40 consumer complaint cases.

Former Transportation secretary Norman Mineta, the only Democrat in President Bush's Cabinet before stepping down in July 2006, recalls that funding and staffing for the enforcement office was a sore point.

"We ran into a budgetary buzz saw," Mineta, vice chairman of public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, said in a recent interview.