Is Airline Opposition to the Department of Transportation's New Consumer Protection Regulations Unreasonable?

A number of air carriers, headed by Southwest Airlines (and including, as you'd expect, regulation-hating Spirit Airlines), have filed a major lawsuit seeking to enjoin and nullify the consumer protection regulations recently proposed by the Department of Transportation. And chief among those regulations is a requirement that airlines include the cost of all government fees and taxes in the airfares they advertise. Instead of saying that a particular flight cost $148*, for instance, referring in a small-type footnote to another $127 in fees and taxes, the airlines will have to say, up front, that the flight costs $275.

Southwest says, among other things, that making this change will require millions of dollars of calculations and rewrites, given that Southwest flies between hundreds of cities, at differing prices for each flight.

I wondered, as I read Southwest's objection, if that eminent carrier had heard of the computer.

It does not seem difficult at all to devise a computer program that will instantly calculate the total, all-in price of Southwest's individual fares. Certainly, Southwest currently performs that function when it charges each passenger for the ticket they have bought. Someone, somewhere, needs to include the fees and taxes which will be appended to a particular fare.

I have not yet read the court papers, but only a summary of them in the travel trade press, and would be surprised if the courts upheld the airlines' objections to what seems a reasonable proposal by an administrative agency. Courts usually accord great weight to the regulations proposed by such administrative agencies.