Among the regulations IATA takes issue with include the Biden Administration’s proposed plan to require airlines to compensate passengers for delays or cancellations within their control.
Trade groups representing the airline industry have requested that the nascent Trump Administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) review what consumer protection regulations implemented during the Obama and Biden years.
The International Air Transport Association wrote a letter to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in late January, encouraging the administration to take a less direct approach to consumer regulations for airlines, writing:
“The first Trump Administration was strongly committed to the letter and spirit of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (ADA) and its endorsement of free market principles. Unfortunately, the Biden Administration parlayed its limited authority to protect air passengers from ‘unfair and deceptive’ practices by airlines into an unprecedented regulatory regime more prescriptive than that applied to any other mode of transportation. In many cases, efforts to promote consumer welfare have ignored operational realities and engendered a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach that has stifled innovation and product differentiation and thus compromised the benefits of competition consumers would otherwise enjoy.”
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The letter goes on to address a number of other aviation-related topics, including airport infrastructure, air traffic control staffing, safety oversight, airport slots, and pilot retirement age.
The leading complaint of the letter was what IATA terms regulatory overreach, saying that the Obama and Biden DOTs had overstepped their authority by aggressively issuing rules that were harmful to the airline industry, also arguing that the former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “spent four years browbeating the U.S. airlines to deliver his vision of how airlines should treat their customers through the threat of additional regulation and public shaming.”
Among the regulations IATA takes issue with include the Biden Administration’s proposed plan to require airlines to compensate passengers for delays or cancellations within their control, similar to requirements in Canada and the European Union, which IATA points out didn’t reduce how often airlines delayed or canceled flights, but made them more costly to airlines, which in turn pressured fares upwards.
Another regulation IATA requests to end is a rule that requires airlines to disclose ancillary service fees on the first search page, which IATA considers “illogical.” Airlines for America, the trade association for US airlines, and Spirit Airlines, which counts the fees as a significant feature of its unbundled low-fare business model are currently challenging the rule in US courts.
IATA similarly requests modifications to rules that would require airlines to issue travel credits with extended expiration dates for travelers who have to cancel in certain situations such as illness. The agency also feels that sweeping rule changes in how airlines accommodate passengers with disabilities—particularly those who use and travel with wheelchairs—“ignored operational and economic realities in favor of unrealistic proposals pushed by advocacy organizations.”
The role of the DOT in implementing consumer protection rules has been debated since US airlines were deregulated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. The DOT doesn’t have the authority to pass consumer protection laws, only to create rules based on existing consumer protection laws already written by Congress. IATA pointed this out in a paragraph about rules they felt were too prescriptive in how airlines would be required to accommodate families with small children needing to sit together without paying additional seat assignment fees.
They point out that “Congress mandated that DOT ‘establish a policy directing air carriers . . . to sit each young child adjacent to any accompanying adult, to the greatest extent practicable’”, but that Congress did not intend that DOT prescribe specific procedures for doing so.
The DOT has not yet publicly responded to the assertions in the IATA letter.
One regulation that the public can expect to have stick around, however, is the Biden Administration’s stricter standard for approving mergers between airlines or other corporations. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson alerted employees in a memo on February 18 that the FTC’s joint guidelines on mergers with the Department of Justice (DOJ) implemented 2023 will remain in place. DOJ successfully sued to stop a JetBlue/Spirit merger in 2023, but a proposed Alaska Airlines acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines wasn’t challenged; that transaction was finalized in the Fall of 2024.
The DOT reviews airline merger proposals separately from the FTC and DOJ.
IATA is the trade association for the world’s airlines, with more than 350 member carriers in 120 countries.
