Air travel is getting worse, judging from the variety of consumer complaints.
Consumer complaints about airlines nearly doubled in the primary three months of this yr compared with the identical period last yr and kept soaring in April and May, the Transportation Department said Wednesday.
Those are the most recent figures from the federal government. The Transportation Department said details about complaints has been delayed because there are such a lot of of them to process.
The department said it received 24,965 complaints about airline service in the primary three months of the yr, up 88% from the primary quarter of 2022. Consumers filed one other 6,712 complaints in April, up 32% from a yr earlier, and 6,465 in May, a rise of 49%.
The Transportation Department said that disability-related complaints, comparable to delaying or damaging wheelchairs, are also up from last yr. There have been 636 such complaints in the primary quarter, nearly double the 380 filed through the same period of 2022. The agency says it investigates each of those disability complaints.
The department is investigating “several domestic airlines” for possibly offering flight schedules that they’re unlikely to give you the chance to perform, it said. Southwest Airlines has publicly disclosed that it’s being investigated after a service meltdown that led to almost 17,000 canceled flights last December.
For all of the hundreds of complaints lodged with the federal government, it is probably going that buyers file many more complaints directly with the airlines.
