We are pleased to report that despite the dreaded budget sequester, the Transportation Department (DOT) still has the resources to make anonymous phone calls to agents to see if they abide by the letter of the law when it comes to disclosing airline codeshares.
As we report in the news pages today, the DOT will be making these test calls in response to concerns by its inspector general that agents may be falling down on the job, and that the DOT's enforcement office may have been lax in monitoring industry compliance.
The inspector general's concerns notwithstanding, we are not aware of any evidence that great numbers of agency clients have been mistreated by scofflaw retailers. Still, rules are rules. There's not much point in having them if you can't monitor their effectiveness.
We suspect most agents consider it a shoddy business practice to sell an airline ticket and not tell the customer the name of the airline. By the same token, we suspect there are many consumers who don't listen, don't remember, don't read instructions and don't read their itinerary until they're getting out of the taxi at -- you guessed it -- the wrong terminal.
One of the original goals of codesharing, as it caught on like wildfire in the 1980s, was to mislead machines (the early GDSs) about an airline's identity, without misleading the people who depended on the machines for flight information (travelers). There was something loony about it then, and the looniness has never really gone away: "It's OK to say that A is B, as long as you make it clear to people that it really isn't."
Codesharing, then as now, also creates benefits for carriers, for communities, for passengers and for mileage junkies, but it has always had the capacity to deceive.
In the 30 or so years that we've been living with this arrangement, a large share of the burden for neutralizing that deception has fallen on travel agents.
So while it might be appropriate for the DOT to make its anonymous phone calls and maybe issue some cease-and-desist orders, and maybe collect a few fines to mollify its inspector general, we have to wonder whether the best minds of the airline business and the best minds of the DOT and its inspector general can't find some better tools for educating consumers than the punitive instruments that are about to come down on travel agents -- for whom the benefits of codesharing are, then as now, a little murky.