Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
Transparency of Airline Ancillary Fees and Other Consumer Protection Issues
Docket OST-2014-0056
Communications with respect to this document should be sent to:
Jim Lites, Executive Director
California Airports Council
1510 14 th Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
916-553-4999 jlites@calairportscouncil.org

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
Transparency of Airline Ancillary Fees and Other Consumer Protection Issues
Docket OST-2014-0056
The California Airports Council (CAC) is pleased to have the opportunity to comment on the U.S Department of Transportation (DOT) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Transparency of Airline Ancillary Fees and Other Consumer Protection Issues, 79
Fed. Reg. 29970 (May 23, 2014) (the “NPRM”). The CAC is supportive of the NPRM in general and is specifically writing in support of the proposal to expand the pool of
“reporting carriers” (RCs) and the requirement for RCs to include data for their domestic code-share partners, as this issue has the most significance to our member airports.
The CAC represents the 34 commercial service airports in California, who served almost 180 million passengers in 2012. California airports account for more commercial aviation activities than any other single state, equating to 13.5% of all commercial aviation in the United States. The economic impact of California commercial aviation is significant, generating $15.5 billion in wages and supporting 386,000 jobs statewide.
The overall industry output of California airports generates more than $63 billion of activity to the US and California economies. The mission of the California Airports
Council is to support and promote a robust environment for California’s network of commercial aviation airports to thrive and grow, emphasizing the safe movement of passengers and goods through California commercial airports.
The CAC is of the opinion the time has come for DOT to expand the pool of “reporting” carriers; requiring enhanced reporting by the mainline legacy carriers for their domestic code-share partner operations for delays. Regional airlines now provide the vast majority of scheduled services to not only California airports, but also operate over half of all daily domestic flights in the US. Regional carriers provide the only service in more than 70 % of all US airports. A number of airports serving small Northern California communities and San Francisco International (SFO) have much lower on-time performance (OTP) than the national average—see attachment. It is our opinion that the relatively poor OTP of certain flights is being obscured by the current reporting process.

The CAC recommends that DOT expand the reporting requirements to all commercial airlines. Many passengers are unaware that their ticket purchased on a mainline carrier’s website, may in fact be a flight on a domestic code-share partner of the airline, and the effects of delays, baggage mishandling or denied boarding are not reflected in the delay notifications of the mainline carrier in the DOT Air Travel Consumer Report.
For all of these reasons it makes sense for DOT to publish statistics for the ticketed airline, not the operating one.
With the significant growth of regional airlines at airports of all sizes, it’s critical that DOT include all of the carriers operations in consumer protection regulations and notifications. Passengers deserve the customer service, passenger protections and legal rights afforded by DOT regulations, regardless of where their flights originate or end. As an example under DOT’s proposed rule, for one of the CAC’s member airports,
United Airlines on-time arrival performance at SFO would have been six percentage points lower in July 2014 (see attachment) than what was reported under the current regulations. LAX’s OTP results for the same time period would be higher with expanded
“reporting carriers”, reinforcing the argument that the reporting pool should be expanded in order to provide the consumer with better information.
Therefore, the CAC supports DOT’s proposal to revise current regulations to require
“reporting carriers” to include on-time performance and mishandled baggage data for their code-share partners and for this data to be included in the DOT Air Travel
Consumer Report. Current reporting requirements do not always provide accurate and comprehensive data to consumers as almost 50% of the domestic flights marketed by the nation’s three largest airlines are operated by code-sharing partners. This consumer friendly change in reporting requirements would provide more comprehensive information on which to base travel decisions. We urge DOT to promptly issue a final rule implementing proposed changes to enhance consumer protection for airline passengers in large and small communities throughout the United States.
Respectfully Submitted,
Thella Bowens
President