Consumer Regulations Do Little to Protect EU PAX Bumped From Overbooked Flights

A passenger “Bill of Rights” provides some solace for the nearly 50,000 flyers who find themselves denied boarding on oversold British Airways flights each year.

In general, air travelers in Europe are afforded much greater consumer protections than passengers who find themselves flying in the U.S. European Union (EU) regulations even require compensation of several hundred dollars for passengers in circumstances in which a flight has been delayed by as little as three hours. Parts of the so-called “passenger bill of rights” have gone a long way toward preventing the sort of barbaric scene like the one that infamously occurred on a United Airlines flight this week.

According to a recent study from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the UK’s privately operated aviation regulatory agency, passengers across the pond are largely pleased with their everyday air travel experience, but when it comes to instances of being involuntarily bumped from overbooked flights, those passengers aren’t much better off than flyers in North America and like their US counterparts, travelers in the UK are not at all pleased with how the airlines handle these situations.

The Independent this week published CAA statistics that reveal well over 50,000 British Airways passengers are involuntarily denied boarding every year. The vast majority of those passengers were bumped from their flight because the carrier had legally and intentionally oversold the flight.

“The main reasons airlines denied boarding were due to overbooking or having to bring in a smaller aircraft than planned to operate a flight,” according to the CAA study on ticketed passengers bumped from flights with the UK’s largest carriers.

The denied boarding statistics published by the newspaper did not differentiate between passengers who volunteered to take a later flight in exchange for compensation and those who were involuntarily re-accommodated. A separate study, however, found that at least some passengers were left feeling cheated by the process.

“It is clear there are many aspects the industry is getting right but there are some areas, including how passengers are treated during and after disruption and how they manage complaints, where some of the industry is currently falling short,” CAA Policy Director Tim Johnson announced in December. “If improvements are not delivered and we continue to see dissatisfaction, we will not hesitate to use our regulatory and enforcement powers.”

The promise that airlines will deliver on those improvements and the accompanying subtle threats from regulators has likely taken on a new sense of urgency in the wake of the public relations nightmare unleashed when United Airlines neglected to make similar improvements in how passengers are treated during and after disruption and how complaints have been managed.