Air fair

It’s a great time to be an airline. Fuel prices are at historic lows. Profits are sky-high. Wall Street loves you. So does Congress. Thanks to deregulation, you fly where you want, when you want, the public — which ultimately pays for your airports and air-traffic controllers — be damned.

So now, while every anti-trust lawyer in Washington is preoccupied with killing Microsoft, you and your major airline buddies gleefully announce a lock-step fare increase. And — attention coach passengers — there will be no more bone-dry, profit-gobbling sandwiches on those coast-to-coast flights. Enjoy the peanuts du jour.

It was only a matter of time until someone, other than stand-up comics, squawked. The squawker is the American Society of Travel Agents, representing the innocent bystanders who are the number-one recipient of airline consumer complaints.

ASTA is proposing to Congress an Air Traveler’s Bill of Rights. Among its provisions are: truth in advertised prices, schedules and seat availability; equal access to comparative travel information, including fare and service differences; timely, complete and truthful information about delays, cancellations and equipment changes; and access to courts and state consumer laws to resolve complaints.

According to ASTA, the most common complaints agents handle are that those amazingly low advertised fares are nothing more than come-ons, that many holders of frequent-flier miles find it virtually impossible to redeem them, and that flights often are canceled to consolidate two less-than-full airplanes into one and explained away as a mechanical problem.

The Bill of Rights would require that an ad for a $99 fare from New York to Los Angeles also tell the public how many seats are available at that rate. It would require that frequent-flier miles, promoted as a discount to reward regular customers, must be applicable to any flight. The reasons for cancellations must be verified.

ASTA also wants the penalty for changing a ticket — now as high as $75 — to bear some relationship to the actual cost of making the change. It wants comfortable seats, decent meals, courteous service, adequate in-flight emergency medical care. In short, it wants the very thing the nation had before deregulation — a competitive environment in which the customer came first.

The airline industry vows to fight this Bill of Rights with all of the lobbying clout it can muster, and it joins the battle with a powerful ally — a Congress with a fundamental aversion to regulation, especially when the regulation applies to generous campaign donors. The question is whether Congress, living it up in first class, knows what a mess it is back in coach.