Airline 'contracts' limit what passengers should expect

— -- Randolph Jones travels more than 100,000 miles a year. In that time, he's had his bags delayed three times and one bag damaged.

He's been offered vouchers to take later flights because his was oversold. He's missed connecting flights at least five times.

Jones, a management consultant from Marietta, Ga., realizes much can go wrong when traveling by air. But for a long time he hasn't bothered to look at an airline's contract of carriage — the fine print on an airline's website that details what responsibility the airline has to a passenger when a flight is canceled or delayed, when luggage is lost and when there aren't enough seats for everyone on a plane.

He knows the contracts work in the airlines' favor. "It basically says they are responsible for little, and if they fail it is, 'Oh well,' " he says.

Although the federal government has increased protection for passengers in the last two years, the legal fine print in airlines' contracts of carriage really spells out the agreement you've got with the carrier when you buy a ticket. In a nutshell: The airlines promise to get you from one place to another — but they don't guarantee they'll do so on time.

Many people taking to the skies this summer for vacations don't even know that contracts of carriage exist. Although located on each airline's website, they're not always prominently displayed. On Delta Air Lines' website, for instance, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the home page and click on the link for "Legal."

If travelers do find the contracts, they typically don't have the patience to go through pages and pages of legalese, or find that it's too often skewed against them. "They're written by airline lawyers for airlines," says Robert Mann, founder of airline consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co.

The Transportation Department has tipped the scales back toward consumers by ruling:

•Airlines can no longer let domestic flights linger on airport tarmacs for longer than three hours or international flights for longer than four hours. If passengers are stuck on tarmacs for more than two hours, airlines have to give them food and water and access to bathrooms.

•Airlines are required to refund baggage fees if the bag is lost.

•Advertised airfares must include all government taxes and other fees once hidden behind asterisks or in footnotes. All baggage fees must also be included when you book and pay for a ticket online.

•Customers can change their reservations without having to pay re-booking fees within 24 hours of making them.

•Previously, if a flight was oversold and you were involuntarily kept off the plane, you'd get up to twice the value of the one-way price of the ticket, up to $800. Now you can get as much as four times the value, or $1,300.

"We've never had the (Transportation Department) taking on the carriers for consumer protection as they did the last year," says Alexander Anolik, a San Francisco-based travel lawyer.

But are the new protections enough?

Consumer complaints against U.S. airlines are on the rise. In April of this year, there were 865 complaints filed with the Transportation Department against U.S. airlines, up from 745 in April 2011.