One of our favorite laws, the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences, appears to be at work again at the Transportation Department, where an effort to improve the lot of consumers has apparently led to increased job security for airline industry IT people.
As we report in the news pages today, the DOT last April adopted a package of consumer protection rules that included two separate and apparently simple provisions that get very complicated when they interact.
First was a requirement that airlines include baggage fee data on e-ticket confirmations in such a way that passengers can figure out how they affect their particular itinerary, such as their class of service, frequent flyer status, use of an affinity card, etc.
Second was a rule that baggage allowances and fees on multicarrier itineraries must be the same throughout, governed by either the first carrier on the itinerary or, in the case of codeshares, the carrier whose code is used.
It turns out that for multicarrier itineraries, and especially international ones, there's no app for that.
Most airline ticketing systems are incapable of producing the kind of notice that the DOT rule requires because they can't automatically fetch the appropriate data from another airline as part of the booking and confirmation process.
Further, most airport check-in systems can't fetch it, either. If a passenger checking bags at Carrier C's airport counter is in the middle of an itinerary that began two days earlier on Carrier A, Carrier C might have no way of knowing that, much less any way of knowing what Carrier A's baggage fees are.
That, at least, is the story the airlines are telling the DOT. We find the airlines' story interesting for lots of reasons, especially these two:
First, despite their antipathy to government intervention and "burdensome" regulations, the airlines are being surprisingly good sports about the mess that they describe. To read their petition, it seems that they have carefully parsed the tortured language of the rules, requested clarifications from the DOT, consulted with their technology people and are making an effort to comply.
Second, airline IT systems are shockingly backward in some particulars. Maybe the airlines are secretly grateful that the potentially burdensome DOT rule is forcing a much-needed upgrade.