Good morning. Maria Aspan, senior writer at Fortune, here.
Southwest Airlines is having a rough start to this holiday season, thanks to an ongoing hangover from last Christmas.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it had fined Southwest a record-breaking $140 million over last year’s holiday meltdown, when a winter storm led the airline to cancel almost 17,000 flights and strand more than 2 million travelers. The government said Southwest’s penalty, for “numerous violations of consumer protection laws,” is 30 times larger than any prior Dept. of Transportation fine over consumer protection violations.
Now, as a record 7.5 million people are predicted to start flying for this December’s holidays, Southwest is hoping it can move on from last Christmas. The airline said it has “learned from the event, and now can shift its entire focus to the future.” (It’s trying to look forward on multiple fronts; also this week, Southwest reached a tentative labor agreement with its 11,000 pilots, after three and a half years of negotiations.)
Still, it remains to be seen whether Southwest—or any other individual airline—can avoid a similar meltdown this holiday season. That $140 million penalty is one of the most headline-grabbing reminders of just how miserable flying is these days, as I wrote in a recent analysis for Fortune. But it’s far from the only one: Flying is now so terrible that the U.S. government literally can’t keep up with all the people complaining about it.
In 2022, the Dept. of Transportation received more than 77,600 official consumer complaints—up 55% from 2021, and more than five times the pre-pandemic levels of 2019—about delays, cancellations, refunds, boarding, baggage, and a whole host of other air travel problems. This year, more than 38,100 consumers filed complaints during the first five months of 2023, according to the federal agency’s monthly Air Travel Consumer Report—and that’s where the data stops. More than half a year later, the Dept. of Transportation says it’s still struggling to work through the flood of complaints it has received from unhappy airline customers since the end of May.
“It is increasingly clear that consumer complaints are not returning to pre-pandemic levels,” the monthly report says of the data backlog.
So the problems with air travel go far beyond one airline or one holiday meltdown or one “hellish” summer of post-Covid vacation chaos. When Benjamin Franklin wrote that “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” he clearly hadn’t experienced the inevitable dysfunction of modern air travel.
The air travel system “is so miserable for so many people—and has real downsides for the country,” as author Ganesh Sitaraman told me. A law professor at Vanderbilt University and a longtime former adviser to Elizabeth Warren, he’s written a perfectly-named and well-timed book about the roots of our national breakdown: Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It.
Sitaraman’s advice for “how to fix it” involves various proposals for increasingly regulating the airline industry—proposals that it’s hard to see airlines or many other business interests embracing. But, he points out, our broken air travel system hurts employers and business interests along with consumers:
“Who wants to start a Fortune 500 company in a city that doesn’t have an airport, or that doesn’t have much airline service?” he says. “That’s a real downside for economic growth and vibrancy and opportunity in lots of different places.”
Read my full article here. Happy holidays, everyone—and good luck with your travel plans.
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan
