Editorial: Double Standards

By now it should be clear to all involved that when it comes to transportation, lawmakers and regulatory authorities in the US and EU maintain a glaring double standard—to the disadvantage of airlines.

As Senior Editor Aaron Karp observes in his article on Washington’s new passenger rights proposals (p. 54), if an interstate train journey in the US is interrupted, or delayed for an extended period of time, no one in a position of power suggests that travelers are owed refunds or some form of compensation for their inconvenience. Nor do the major news media bring their cameras and mobile studios trackside to demand an accounting from railroad executives.

If heavy snowfall paralyzes a popular European rail network, stranding thousands of travelers in their homes or hotel rooms and trapping others under the English Channel for hours and hours, authorities apparently regard it as an act of nature, not a major failure on the part of the railroad (although the EU recently has been shamed into extending some passenger protections to rail travelers).

Contrast this to the handling of the volcanic ash crisis. To add insult to injury, the EC apparently feels European travelers still do not know enough about their air travel rights and is set to launch a new public information campaign.

But this double standard is not limited to delays and cancellations. A safety double standard exists in places as well. The rail and bus transit system in Washington, DC, has had a series of troubling lapses over the past 18 months and investigations have uncovered systemic problems across the organization. Yet safety problems persist, with seemingly little interest on Capitol Hill despite the proximity of the issue. Compare this to the quest of some in Congress to impose broad new inspection and drug-testing requirements on overseas maintenance providers despite the fact that no problems have been identified and that doing so would violate existing international aviation safety agreements.

To a degree this double standard is understandable, if unacceptable. Mass transit systems as well as passenger railroads are, with a few exceptions, owned and operated by national, state or local governmental bodies or through quasi-governmental authorities and as such are both political animals and largely self-regulated.

But the double standard is not limited to transportation providers. Lawmakers and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are busy writing and rewriting rules aimed at ensuring that the advertising and selling of airfares is as transparent as the cockpit window of a new 777, regardless of the cost and complexity such requirements will impose and a lack of empirical evidence that current practices are misleading large numbers of travelers.

We don’t disagree that airfares and add-ons should be clearly identified and that deliberately misleading practices should be prevented. But why are similar efforts not being devoted to insuring that retailers of other consumer goods and services be held to the same standards? The cost to park a car in a downtown hotel garage often bears no relationship to local market conditions, but out-of-town travelers usually are unaware of this fact and also may be unwilling to venture far in a strange city to find a better deal. Why are politicians not up in arms?

But why pick on hotels? Consider banks and ATM fees. Is there anything hazier than why it now typically costs $5 or more to make a withdrawal through a bank other than one’s own? How about mobile phones? The number of plans and product offerings is mesmerizing and the pricing options are at least as varied as a typical Ryanair ticket. But no one (at least in the US) is suggesting that providers be required to furnish the kind of comprehensive comparative pricing information that some have proposed for the airline industry.

In fact, one can find any number of examples, across all areas of public and private sector activity, to confirm the fact that legislators and even the general public support a separate standard when it comes to regulating airline industry practices and behavior and everyone else.

Underlying this fact is that more than 30 years after US airline deregulation, the industry exists in a kind of permanent halfway house between being seen as a private sector business and a public service and utility (except, of course, that real utility companies still are allowed to operate on a cost plus basis).

It is long past time for Washington and Brussels to begin treating airlines like other private businesses or begin treating other private business like the airline industry. As every child knows, double standards are simply unfair.