Ted and Susan Mortimer had made and paid for reservations last November to take their young children, 3 and 8, to Disney World over President’s Day weekend in February. The party also included Susan’s parents, her 57-year-old mother recovering from two broken arms.
The Canton, Ga., family arrived at Atlanta International Airport in ample time for their 6:40 a.m. departure to Orlando on Delta Air Lines Flight 659. They had checked their bags, had boarding passes and assigned seats.
When the Mortimers boarded the plane at the appropriate time, they found their spaces occupied by people who had been assigned the same seats. It quickly became apparent to the flight attendants and the gate agent that the flight was oversold. The Mortimers plus other seatless passengers were asked to disembark to be rescheduled on another flight to Orlando.
To make Susan Mortimer’s long story short, Delta put her family on an American Airlines flight to Miami to eventually connect with a flight to Orlando. Instead of arriving in Orlando at 8 a.m., to get a full day at Disney World as they had planned, they arrived nearly 6 hours later.
When asked about the Mortimer incident, Delta looked into it and contended the family had volunteered to get off the flight. “At no point did she say to the agent, `No, I don’t want to give up my seat,’ ” said Tracey Bowen, a Delta spokeswoman.
“Totally, totally incorrect,” said Mortimer. “We were not volunteering. We begged them to put us on the flight. They said it was not an option.”
Yes, the Mortimers received Delta coupons for future “free” round-trip tickets, as the airlines are required to do when they deny boarding to a ticketed passenger. But as Susan Mortimer said, it was the case of the “Corporate World” stomping on the “Vacationing Family.”
Mortimer’s ill-fated Delta Dream Vacation just goes to show that air travelers can’t assume anything when it comes to the airline industry. With all their computer power, the airlines cannot guarantee that your paid-for seat will be available, especially if you’re flying on a deeply discounted ticket.
In its monthly Air Travel Consumer Report on “oversales,” the Department of Transportation said there were 10,499 involuntary and 235,560 voluntary denied boardings (1.16 per 10,000 passengers) among the nation’s top 10 airlines in the July-September 1997 period. Denied boardings occur when a flight is oversold and passengers who hold confirmed reservations are bumped from the flight.
Sometimes passengers are happy to delay their departure for a free ticket. But sometimes people don’t want to volunteer for bumping compensation. So who gets left behind for a later flight?
Delta, for example, has a pecking order for whom it chooses to bump involuntarily. “The last person to check in at the gate area normally gets bumped,” said Bowen. “Passengers holding confirmed First-Class tickets will be accommodated before passengers holding confirmed Coach space. In Coach we look at what time the person checked in at the gate. The physically disabled, unaccompanied minors, aged or infirm passengers gets first consideration, even if he or she checked in last.”
United Airlines’ Joe Hopkins elaborated. “If we have to involuntarily deny a person a seat, we’re obligated by the DOT to compensate the person for the face value of the ticket to the first stop–up to $200. If we can’t get them to that point within two hours, compensation is doubled. Who gets left behind? Passengers without a boarding pass are the most vulnerable. Physically handicapped passengers get first priority. Then it’s a question of the value of the ticket,” which means that First-Class and full-fare Coach passengers get priority over passengers with cheap tickets.
Lawton Roberts, a suburban Atlanta travel agent, recently launched his own war against the airlines. He self-published a book, “Unfair at Any Fare,” which Mark Pestronk, a widely known travel industry attorney, called a “coherent and cogent indictment” of the airlines. Roberts’ book, available via the Internet at www.essence.on.ca, tackled such issues as denied boarding, instant fares, tariffs, predatory pricing, service, frequent-flier awards and hub city monopolies.
Airlines, Roberts said, are legally within their rights to overbook a flight, “but I don’t think they are within their rights to oversell a flight. It’s time that the truth get out to the American public about what this industry is doing to consumers. Congress has got to change the law that allows the airlines to overbook. And they’ve got to change the law that says the states have no authority in consumer protection matters with regards to airline travel. The airlines know the only authority in the nation to look out for the consumer is a DOT office staffed by two people to protect millions of flyers every day. That’s ridiculous.”
Roberts emphasized that airline deregulation is not the problem. “The problem is that deregulation did not provide sufficient boundaries and protections in the law for the consumer in this country. The airlines went from too much control to too little control. We need to bring the pendulum back toward the middle. We need some enforcement boundaries to protect the consumer.”
It’s not surprising that people flying on deeply discounted tickets find themselves the airlines’ underclass. As an article in the March issue of Conde Nast Traveler points out, airlines love full-fare customers, mainly business travelers. The article quotes Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an aviation research firm, who said: “Airplanes are smaller, and when seating capacity is tight, airlines want the person who will pay a higher fare. They couldn’t care less about the family of four who pays five cents a mile to go to see Dumbo.”
And finally, the American Society of Travel Agents and the Coalition for Travel Industry Parity are jointly urging Congress to look at airline anti-consumer practices and ultimately direct the secretary of transportation to make changes in airline practices.
The bottom line, however, is that people who buy a ticket for a specific flight should get what they paid for, not a substitute that gets them to a destination six hours late as happened to the Mortimers.
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Alfred Borcover’s e-mail address is aborcover@aol.com
