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What Does the DOT's New Airline Consumer Site Do, Anyway?

February 4, 2010 at 9:05 AM | by | Comments (0)

We've spent the last week confused about the Department of Transportation's new airline-oriented consumer protection effort. The official title of the revamped site is "Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement," but we're not exactly sure what we're supposed to be doing with it. At first we thought it was a way to suggest TSA improvements. That's what some random pro-TSA travel site said it was for. But that doesn't seem to be right, since there's very little about TSA on the site. Then we thought that maybe they were taking complaints about politicians who are trying to ruin our tourism industry, perhaps from regional travel boards or something. But that doesn't seem to be it either. Their About Us section is certainly no help:

The Office of the Assistant General Counsel for Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings, including its Aviation Consumer Protection Division, monitors compliance with and investigates violations of the Department of Transportation’s (Department) aviation economic, consumer protection, and civil rights requirements. The Office also provides legal review and support on aviation economic licensing matters.

It looks like our government has designed a site to track airline ontime percentages and to take complaints about airline customer service. Which is kind of a shame since we don't really need the government to do either of those things. There are already dozens of sites that track airline statistics, and since many of them have slick mobile phone apps we're inclined to stick with them. And there are airline customer service departments to take airline customer service complaints...sometimes.

We'd much prefer if there was an independent authority where we could report, say, TSA employees who prank college students to tears. Or TSA employees who create fake bigoted game shows. Or TSA employees who are—quote—"sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-disabled vet... [and] grossly incompetent."

All of which is a roundabout way of asking: is airline customer service really the problem with civilian aviation? Yeah there are those recurring disasters where planes get indefinitely grounded on the tarmac, but even those have been tapering off. I's not that we don't appreciate the government's efforts to keep a watchful eye on everything that makes travel suck. It's just that we'd prefer more targeted efforts.

Related Stories:
· Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement [Official Site]
· TSA [Jaunted]
· Airports [Jaunted]

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