Air Travel Consumer Protection

The raison d'être for the national air transportation system (ATS) is the movement of passengers and cargo. Thus, passenger trip time performance is positively correlated with passenger satisfaction, airfare elasticity, and airline profits. Regulatory consumer information available to airline passengers provides measures of trip performance by using the percentage of on-time flights or on-time percentage (OTP) (e.g., 15-OTP metric). Researchers have shown that these flight-based metrics are poor proxies for passenger trip time performance. First, these metrics do not include the trip delays accrued by passengers rebooked because of canceled flights (which account for 40% of the overall passenger trip delays). Second, the metrics do not quantify the magnitude of the delay (only the likelihood) and thus fail to provide the consumer with a useful assessment of the impact of a delay (such as missed connections on next mode of transportation). A new consumer protection metric, expected value of passenger trip delay (EV-PTD), is described; it accounts for (a) canceled flights and (b) both the probability of delay and the magnitude of the delay. The EV-PTD for all 1,030 routes between 35 Operational Evolution Plan airports in 2005 ranged from 11.5 min (best) to 155 min (worst). The average route EV-PTD was 35 min. By treating passenger trip delay as a random variable it can be shown that the transportation process is not a fair game and that passengers and service providers (e.g., airlines, air traffic control, airports) cannot beat the system until the variance is significantly reduced. The implications of these results and the use of the EV-PTD metric by consumers for purchasing tickets and for consumer protection are discussed.