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JetBlue makes it official. The “customer bill of rights” they pre-announced a few days ago is now policy, and (importantly) will be incorporated into the contract of carriage. I’ve only been able to give this a quick once-over (busy day, full of meetings) so my reactions are preliminary, but my first instinct is: “So what?”

I mean, great, they’re admitting they screwed up, and it’s good that a “bill of rights” is incorporated into the contract of carriage, giving it legal heft, but in times of long delays, they’re just giving you vouchers for future flights, not cash back.

Vouchers are not a “payment” — the term reporters used to describe Neeleman’s promises on Sunday — in my book.

(A potential exception: involuntary denied boardings resulting from overbookings “shall receive $1000.” Sounds like cash. Accept no substitutes. Insist on 10 Benjamins.)

The policy still leaves plenty of room for the airline to escape its liability for those vouchers. The magic phrase: “Controllable irregularity.” That sounds like anything remotely weather-related could be called “uncontrollable,” even if human error turned a small delay into a big one.

JetBlue’s 3-minute official announcement of some of their policy changes — but not the specifics of their delay/voucher scheme — is below, for your viewing pleasure. The official policy for delays is here (pdf).

I’ve got a bunch of mail from readers on this and similar issues, which I’ll try to get to later tonight. Stay tuned.

For now, though, what do you think? Is jetBlue’s new policy enough?

Click the YouTube box to watch:

JetBlue’s passengers haven’t gotten much of a break since the debacle at JFK last week.

Every day this weekend, a quarter of flights were cancelled. Monday’s flights are similarly hard-hit: 139 out of 600 flights are cut.

There were some bright spots: One crew went above and beyond the call of duty by taking the initiative and hiring a taxi from JFK to Newburgh-Stewart to fly an unused (!?) plane to Sarasota. Good for them, and for the passengers who were stuck on the ground in Sarasota. That’s good customer service. But… why were the airline’s assets stuck on the ground in the first place? Why weren’t pilots dispatched to Newburgh in the first place? Anyway…

Other than the taxi hirin’ pilots, it’s been nothing but bad news. So it’s time for damage control.

Today, jetBlue is promising to penalize itself if it screws up again:

[CEO David] Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane. (my emphasis)

First off, hats off to jetBlue for admitting that they screwed up, and that this wasn’t just the weather’s fault. As I’ve argued ad nauseam, this was a problem of logistics and customer service, not snow. Neeleman even went further, and said “his company’s management lacked depth in operations.” Ouch. Someone’s getting schooled. Or fired. Maybe both.

Paying customers for the airline’s failures is interesting. We’ll see if it’s cash, or the dreaded voucher.

Just like American Airlines tried to pre-empt regulation by promising to change its policies, jetBlue is trying to avoid oversight by instituting a new policy. The airline is smart to put money where its mouth is, and this proposed penalty scheme sounds stronger (and more explicit) than any of the customer service plans that airlines created back in 1999. But it remains to be seen if this promise will be legally incorporated into the contract of carriage or not. If it’s not in the contract, then it’s not binding.

That said, this is smart politics by jetBlue. If they can come out of this looking like a customer-service oriented airline again, then they’ve made lemonade out of lemons.

Related:
- Poll: Will a Passengers’ Bill of Rights become law?
- Instant replay? JetBlue passengers stuck on planes for over 9 hours
- Should we trust airlines to improve passenger rights?

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The passengers’ bill of rights is gaining more steam, in light of jetBlue’s latest gaffe. But will it become law? Will this provide the impetus to turn a bill into law? Sound off.

The American Airlines passengers stranded back in December have their blog, pushing for a bill, and now the jetBlue passengers have their own site as well.

As Chris Elliott points out, the blogosphere is largely calling for passage of such legislation. Not everyone agrees, though. For example, the Cranky Flier argues against the bill.

My view is that we do indeed need a bill, since we can’t trust the airlines to adequately police themselves. And while I accept arguments like Cranky’s that airlines don’t WANT to keep passengers hostage onboard their planes, there aren’t sufficient incentives (or punishments) in place to make airlines do the right thing.

In both the American Airlines and jetBlue cases, there were opportunities to bring a plane back to the terminal, to let the passengers out. For various reasons, not limited to weather, the airlines chose not to do so. That’s unacceptable. In my view, passengers should have the legally codified right to not sit on a plane for an open-ended stretch of time. That’s the key. If the only way to give teeth to such a rule is to mandate fines for violations, then fine.

Naturally, the airlines will resist this, tooth and nail. They have lobbyists and can make contributions to the senators and representatives whose committees oversee transportation issues. But public outrage is pretty loud here.

So I put the question to you.

Will a Passengers’ Bill of Rights become law? I’ve (hastily) thrown together a short survey. Take the poll. Results next week.

Here we go again. Just weeks ago, American Airlines was criticized for leaving hundreds of passengers sitting onboard their planes for hours and hours, instead of letting them disembark and return to the terminal. Now, jetBlue repeated the mistake. At least three planes — flights 751, 351, and 850 — were kept on the tarmac for as long as nine hours.

In a statement, the airline admitted that it was not solely due to snowy weather, but also because of “arrivals that we were unable to move to a gate within a reasonable amount of time, due to all gates being occupied.”

Again: Why can’t they call for a bus to bring passengers back to the terminal?

Anyone affected directly by these delays by sitting on the tarmac for more than three hours will at least receive an apology, a full refund, and a voucher for a free flight. (Clearly, jetBlue’s public relations staff learned from the American Airlines debacle recently.)

Though this was awful for the passengers on board these flights, the fact that another incident like this has happened so soon after the last one potentially gives a bit of momentum to the Passengers’ Bill of Rights. (Petition here.)

Related:
- Recent posts on the proposed passengers’ bill of rights

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As reported a few days ago, American Airlines is trying to undermine the proposed Passengers’ Bill of Rights by announcing policy changes that promise service improvements, such as limits on the time passengers spend sitting in aircraft while parked on the tarmac. But should we trust this new policy?

Over the weekend, Joe Brancatelli wrote in to give the issue some historical context. The last time there was a real effort to legislate passenger rights, in 1999, airlines responded with “customer commitments” or “customer service plans,” which are still alive and well on various carriers’ websites.

These plans amount to a list of promises and goals, to which each company vows to adhere. Notably, however, these plans are NOT incorporated into the contract of carriage, and therefore carry no legal weight. They’re a voluntary set of promises, but promises are made to be broken. (Much like Delta’s promise to never put expiration dates on their frequent flyer miles, a promise they went back on recently… but I digress.)

In a 1999 column, Joe argued that the customer service plans were a sham. To this day, American Airlines’ customer service plan still includes this final paragraph:

We take the customer service goals in this plan very seriously. We know that you expect nothing less. However, the Customer Service Plan does not create contractual or legal rights. Rather, our contractual rights and obligations are set out in our conditions of carriage, applicable tariffs, and ticket jacket, all of which provide additional details on the matters discussed and must be consulted to fully understand your rights and our obligations. For example, we are not responsible for any special, incidental, or consequential damages for delays, cancellations, lost baggage, late refunds, or instances in which we do not meet our service goals.

So I share Joe’s pessimism. It’s nice that the airlines would acknowledge that a problem exists, but if the industry doesn’t put any legal meat on these customer service bones by incorporating them into the contract of carriage, then it’s really not worth celebrating. The proposed policies are probably just a cheap imitation of a real set of passengers’ rights. They’re a cynical effort to head off legislation. Keep up the fight.

Related:
- Earlier posts on Passengers’ Bill of Rights

Consumer interest in the proposed Passengers’ Bill of Rights must be gaining momentum, because American Airlines just blinked. The company is publicly making policy changes, in an obvious attempt to avoid regulation.

The Global Traveller caught wind of this last night, and details are now more readily available:

American Airlines Inc. says it won’t hold passengers on grounded aircraft more than four hours, a policy born from a December debacle in which thousands of passengers spent hours in Austin and elsewhere waiting for storms to pass inside crowded parked planes.
[…]
In addition to the four-hour policy, American is making changes at its systems operations control center in Fort Worth to better handle diversions and make sure officials are aware when passengers’ wait times are building up.

The airline is creating a position to oversee diversions and help schedule flights to get passengers back to their connecting hubs.

It is developing automation tools to warn managers when passengers have been on the ground a long time.

The carrier said it also was “reviewing all procedures related to customer handling and make appropriate changes as needed.”
[…]
4,600 customers on 67 planes sat more than three hours Dec. 29, a good portion of whom were kept on board for more than four hours.

American is sending apologies and vouchers of up to $500 to passengers who were subjected to waits of three hours or more on the ground.

Four hours in a parked plane is still more than the three hours that the draft passenger bill of rights calls for, but it’s better than nine…

Interestingly, too, the airline is trying to buy off the angry passengers by throwing them $500 in vouchers, six weeks after the debacle.

Something tells me that Kate Hanni and the other “stranded passengers” won’t be mollified by a promise and a voucher. They shouldn’t be. It’s good that the airline is acknowledging that there are problems with the way it does business, but more needs to be done.

Related:
- Will a passenger bill of rights be enforceable?
- Update: How to support the Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights
- Do we need a passenger bill of rights?

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The hubbub about the proposed passenger bill of rights last week is still alive and well, if my e-mail inbox is any indication. Several readers have written, asking for more information, or ways of supporting the cause of such a bill. (Let’s call it the PBOR for short, giving it that official-sounding government-ese acronymic flavor, and cutting down on my typing…)

The draft PBOR is posted here and at the angry passengers’ blog. A petition is available, too, if you want to show your support.

Congress is taking the PBOR seriously, and I think that’s a good thing, but even if such a bill passes, would it be enforceable? How do you determine blame? And if so, what are the penalties?

Most of the goals that the PBOR sets out are rules or requirements, but the only penalty that’s referenced is for flight cancellation or delay of 12 hours or greater.

For example: “Establish procedures for returning passengers to terminal gate when delays occur so that no plane sits on the tarmac for longer than three hours without connecting to a gate.” No doubt, that’s a reasonable goal, but whom do you blame, and what are the consequences, if this doesn’t happen?

I sat on the ground for hours once at O’Hare, flying back from Philadelphia, after a snowstorm wreaked havoc on Chicago aviation. (This was the same day, in 2005, when the Southwest plane went off the runway and into the streets of Chicago.) The 737 I was on was parked for hours on the outskirts of the airport, waiting for a gate to open. The rear toilets overflowed. It was one of the few times that I wished I was at a European airport like Frankfurt, where every other flight is parked out in the middle of nowhere and passengers are bused back to the terminal. There was no bus for us. Just a long wait, until another gate opened up. But with so much snow falling, few aircraft actually left their gates.

So who was to blame? The airline? The airport? The weather?

The problem with any such legislation isn’t the determination of what the desired outcome should be. It’s the determination of who is to blame when that outcome isn’t reached.

Related:
- Update: How to support the Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights
- Do we need a passenger bill of rights?

Reader Lisa writes:

I would be interested in supporting a passenger bill of rights, if someone started a “movement.” I don’t fly that often, but worry every time I go that I’ll be subjected to something like the 9 hour wait on the runway. Please let me know if there’s somewhere I could email, or send a letter of support for such a thing.

The idea of a passenger bill of rights is not new, but there hasn’t quite been a “movement” yet. The issue is getting some fresh attention lately, though.

Looking back a few years, the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) has a longstanding proposal for a bill of rights. Some arguments in favor of such a bill are here. The airlines, predictably, oppose such a measure, and have been able to keep it off the books. (An account of the industry’s pre-9/11 efforts to block a bill of rights in Congress is here.)

As far as the new efforts to get a bill of rights going, I can’t find a petition address. But there IS a blog… here. The blog, titled “Coalition for Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights,” is presumably run by the lawyers for the passenger group that filed their complaints with Congress (though technically the blog is written under the pseudonym “Coalition for Reform of Airline Passenger Protocol”… or CRAPP.)

If you want to register your support, you might try leaving a comment on that blog. But above all, you should write to your senators and representatives, as well as Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

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Back on December 29, passengers on board American Airlines’ flight 1348 from San Francisco to Dallas experienced the textbook definition of airline hell. A delayed takeoff due to a mechanical. A weather-related diversion to Austin, where no one was allowed to deplane for nine hours. Overflowing toilets. Minimal food. All trapped on board an MD-80. Scott McCartney’s account of the flight is the definitive treatment.

Passengers on board that flight, and their equally angry compatriots from other flights, are still fuming. Their lawyers claim that the airline has never apologized for the treatment. Now, they’re calling for the U.S. Congress to pass a passengers’ bill of rights.

The European Union already has a passenger bill of rights in place. Most famously, it calls for cash payments when the airline delays you for reasons other than weather or acts of God.

See below for the complete Passenger Bill of Rights proposal. Remember, this is just a proposal, as written by a law firm representing angry travelers, and some of it may be pie-in-the-sky. (Do they really think they can control codeshare partners? Good luck with that!) But are they on to something? Read below, then sound off!

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