More flights and fewer cancellations for 2023 nationwide have been reported by the Department of Transportation of the United States as it boasts that the cancellation rate of flights is the lowest in at least ten years and consumer protections for travelers have been expanded.
More Flights and Fewer Cancellations For 2023 in the United States
“In 2023, there were 16.3 million flights and a cancellation rate below 1.2 percent, the lowest rate in a decade. According to the Transportation Security Administration, 2023 was also the busiest year for air travel ever”, according to this official press release from the Department of Transportation. “Travel around Christmas and New Year’s was notably smooth. From Sunday, Dec. 17, 2023, to Monday, January 1, 2024, the cancellation rate was just 0.8 percent despite a record number of passengers flying during the busy holiday season. The cancellation rate during that same period in 2022 was 8.2 percent.”
A significant factor of the poorer record of the cancellation of flights for 2022 was when Southwest Airlines suffered from a notorious meltdown of its operations, for which it agreed to pay $140 million, from which weather was not the only contributing component — even though 71.6 percent of the delays in flights was caused by weather.
In addition to improving operations, the Airline Family Seating Dashboard was introduced by the Department of Transportation on Sunday, March 5, 2023 is designed to assist consumers in selecting an airline which has committed to guaranteeing that an adult passenger who is accompanied by a child who is 13 years of age or younger will sit together in adjacent seats aboard an airplane throughout the entire duration of the flight at no additional cost for all types of fares. As a result, all ten major airlines currently guarantee free rebooking of tickets and meals; and nine of them guarantee lodging accommodations when an airline issue causes a delay or cancellation.
Final Boarding Call
Although airlines can certainly seem to be callous when serving their customers — or offering a lack of service thereof — I highly doubt that they intentionally want to cause flight delays and cancellations; as doing so would impair their operations and sources of revenue…
…so my question is: other than for the holiday travel season of 2023, are the statistics and apparent rhetoric from the Department of Transportation really something about which to boast?
All photographs ©2017 by Brian Cohen.
