Yes, things may change. But there are reasons to expect a close race.
Donald Trump may be facing 91 criminal counts across four separate indictments, but polls continue to show an extremely close 2024 contest between him and President Joe Biden.
A CNN poll released Thursday showed Trump ahead by one point. Other recent polls have shown a tied race or a narrow lead for either candidate. The RealClearPolitics polling average now shows Biden leading by a mere 0.4 percentage point margin — basically a pure toss-up. Polling in swing states has been more sparse this year, but most of the few that have been released have shown close contests too.
Some Democrats have responded with anxiety about what the polls show or cautious hope that there’s still enough time for things to change. Others question whether particular polls are on the level or simply argue it’s too early to read much into them.
It is early, and the polls will likely move around more in the next 14 months before the general election. Many things could happen: Trump could face criminal convictions, Biden’s age (or Trump’s age) could show more, the economy could take a turn for the better or worse. But if we ignore small short-term fluctuations, over the past year, polls have been telling a broadly consistent story of a very close race that Trump has a real shot of winning if, as expected, he wins the GOP nomination.
That meshes with some other things we know about the 2024 race. The same candidates ran in 2020 and it was very close then. And Biden has low approval ratings — suggesting a significant number of people who voted for him aren’t thrilled with his presidency, and that his campaign has a good deal of work to do.
It is early, but polls right now aren’t totally worthless
The conventional wisdom is that polls this far ahead of the election aren’t worth very much, because much will change before Election Day. There’s truth to that — the campaigns will help better frame the choice for voters, less well-known candidates can become better known as the election gets closer (though that may be less of a factor this year since both likely nominees have run before), and events can change voters’ minds.
Polling also fluctuates, so looking at even an average of polls in any one week or month is often unrepresentative, as the numbers could shift afterward.
And yet, looking at the polling averages on RealClearPolitics for recent presidential cycles for the year before the actual election year, they often aren’t so far off the mark.
- 2008: Barack Obama led most polls against John McCain throughout 2007, with a lead of about 5 points on average. In December 2007, the race closed to a tie or a narrow McCain lead, but by February 2008, Obama was back on top. He’d remain leading for the rest of 2008, except for two very brief stretches, and ultimately won the popular vote by 7.
- 2012: Obama led Mitt Romney by about 4 points on average for much of 2011, though his lead shrank to 1 or 2 points by the end of that year, and there were brief stretches when the average showed a tie. He continued to lead throughout 2012, until the first general election debate, when Romney pulled narrowly ahead. But Obama regained a very slight poll lead in early November and ended up winning the popular vote by 4.
- 2016: Hillary Clinton started with a big lead on Trump after he first entered the race in June 2015, but as he locked down more Republican support, he quickly gained a great deal of ground. By September 2015, Clinton still led consistently, but it wasn’t an enormous lead, just 3 or 4 points on average. In 2016, polls repeatedly see-sawed between showing a pretty big Clinton lead and a very close race. In the end, the close race scenario materialized, with Clinton winning the popular vote by 2 and losing the Electoral College.
- 2020: Biden had big leads on Trump in almost every 2019 poll, with his average lead fluctuating between 7 points and 10 points. From about December 2019 through June 2020, his average lead dropped to something close to 5 points. He regained his 7 to 10 point leads from summer 2020 through to the end of the race — but his actual popular vote victory ended up being 4.4 percentage points, with several key swing states being decided by less than 1 percentage point.
Now, if we look back further in time, there are some bigger misses. For instance, George W. Bush consistently had a double-digit lead on Al Gore throughout 1999, when the election ended up being one of the closest in history.
Yet that may have been the last gasp of an old era when true landslide victories seemed possible. The 2000 election ended up establishing the basic “red state vs. blue state” map of solid partisan loyalties that has shown up in every presidential contest since.
Since then, politics has been more polarized and party allegiances have been cemented for many more voters. So our starting assumption should probably be that the presidential election will likely be close — again. And right now, the polls back that assumption up.
Will Trump retain his Electoral College advantage?
Another reason tied national polls might terrify Democrats is that, in both 2016 and 2020, Trump outperformed his national numbers in key swing states.
Though Hillary Clinton won the 2016 national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, Trump won the “tipping point” swing state by 0.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 percentage points, and the tipping point swing state by just 0.6 points.
So one way to think about this is that Clinton would have “needed” to win the popular vote by about 3 points to narrowly win the Electoral College. And Biden needed to win it by 4 points — which he only very barely did.
If we assume that situation will repeat in 2024, national polls showing Trump about tied would seem to herald solid victories for him in swing states. However, it’s not necessarily clear that it will.
A notable feature of the 2022 midterm election map was that Democrats lost ground in solid blue states like New York and California, while generally performing well in the presidential swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. Notably, those were states where “MAGA” candidates closely associated with Trump were on the ballot, and where they performed poorly.
Underperformance in blue areas ended up costing Democrats control of the House of Representatives. But for the Electoral College, it would be meaningless, since Biden is in no danger of losing New York or California. Holding on in the swing states is far more important, if he can manage it.
But it’s too early to say for sure whether he can — midterm electorates are different from presidential year electorates, and infrequent voters inclined toward Trump could be more likely to turn out in these swing states next year. For now, the Electoral College situation should be considered an open question.
On “bedwetting”
Since Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, there’s been a comforting refrain in some Democratic circles that any worry over troubling poll numbers is simply “bedwetting” — baby-like behavior, when really, mommy and daddy (your super-competent candidate and campaign professionals) have things under control. “Everyone chill the fuck out, I got this,” read the text over Obama’s picture in a famous meme.
Those assurances looked prescient for Obama’s two victories, but when they were offered days before Clinton’s 2016 defeat, they didn’t age well.
And though nearly the entire political world assumed Trump couldn’t win that year, in retrospect, the signs were there in the polls all along. Though Clinton had led Trump in polling averages consistently, that lead was often rather small. And some analysts pointed out in advance that the Electoral College map was shaping up to have a Republican tilt that year.
There are reasons to bet on Biden rather than Trump next year. Perhaps some Democratic-leaning voters are unenthusiastic about the president and yearning for alternatives, but would show up when it becomes unmistakably clear that the election is between Biden or Trump. Perhaps criminal convictions really would be the last straw for some would-be Trump supporters.
But there are danger signs for Biden too — like his erosion in support from nonwhite voters that the New York Times’s Nate Cohn has been writing about. And the more those extremely close polls come in, the more it looks like we’re embarking on another grim slog toward an excruciatingly close election.
Meet wage access apps — or payday loans by another name.
If you’re one of the more than a third of Americans who couldn’t afford to cover a $400 emergency, waiting a week or two or longer for a paycheck is a pain, especially if an emergency upends your already tight budget.
For some cash-strapped workers, the solution can be found in an earned wage access app — an increasingly popular service that offers users early pay, often in exchange for a fee, for work they’ve already completed but haven’t yet gotten a paycheck for.
Earned wage access has become an umbrella term for apps that pay out earned wages early, though there are key distinctions among different types of programs. Some of them are integrated directly into employers’ payroll systems to let employees get some of their wages in advance, leaving them with a smaller paycheck on their normal payday. These are offered by some of the biggest employers in the country, including Amazon and Walmart.
Direct-to-consumer early wage access programs, sometimes known as cash advance apps, on the other hand, function more like loans, giving workers their wages in advance based on what they report they’ll earn.
The market for both types of services appears to be growing rapidly. Workers accessed $9.5 billion via early wage access companies like EarnIn, MoneyLion, and DailyPay in 2020, up from $3.2 billion in 2018, according to a report from the research firm Aite Novarica.
The apps are popular across industries that employ low-wage workers, including food service, retail, and gig work, according to a 2021 report by the New York-based accounting and consulting firm KPMG. Employers such as Uber, McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, and Chili’s have introduced earned wage access programs in some form, and KPMG predicts the sector will continue expanding and reach new classes of workers, including white-collar workers.
Early pay programs can spot workers who are short on cash, and some can be less costly compared to credit cards. But some apps charge service fees so high that many experts say they’re merely payday loans by another name, draining precious funds from already cash-strapped low-wage workers. Some programs’ fees are repaid by directly debiting workers’ bank accounts, which creates the risk of steep overdraft fees, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.
Between January 2016 and January 2023, workers filed more than 450 payday loan-related complaints against early wage access providers with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, citing issues including unexpected fees, an inability to stop withdrawals from their bank accounts, and problems paying the advances off at the end of a loan period, Vox’s analysis of CFPB data found.
Employers position earned wage access programs as a workplace benefit and personal finance tool that offers workers flexibility and control over when they’re paid. Yet these services also reflect and reinforce the high cost of being poor in America: Rather than getting paid enough in the first place to cover everyday expenses and save for emergencies, workers are penalized for needing early access to wages that they’ve already earned.
“The biggest problem with these programs is they really end up [with] people paying to be paid, and that’s just wrong,” Saunders said.
With their popularity surging, early wage providers are now facing intensifying regulatory scrutiny, which could limit their ability to extract high fees from their customers. But the industry is also working to head off regulation by carving itself out of laws that protect consumers from predatory lending.
Early wage access, explained
Some companies cover their workers’ fees for early wage programs, so they can get their pay earlier at no extra charge, while others pass the costs onto employees and contractors. Employer-based programs generally charge fees of a few dollars per transaction, depending on the amount of money that’s requested, while cash advance app fees can range from less than a dollar to over $20, according to Nerdwallet.
That may not sound like much, but the costs can add up. Uber, for example, offers an early wage access service that lets drivers cash out their earnings up to five times per day for $0.85 per transaction. If a driver does this every day for five days, it’ll cost them $21.25 in fees. Multiply that over four weeks, and it totals $85. A recent report from California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation found that fees for early wage access programs, including both employer-backed and direct-to-consumer programs, averaged an eye-popping annual interest (APR) of more than 300 percent.
“Employers often claim that these programs are a benefit. If they’re a benefit, then the employer should pay for it,” Saunders said.
Some cash advance apps push customers to pay a “tip” to the app to be able to access their funds. The term “tip” is effectively a way for apps to disguise fees, said Yasmin Farahi, deputy director of state policy and senior policy council at the Center for Responsible Lending. Consumers often don’t know that these fees are optional and cannot figure out how to opt out of them, she added.
Employer-backed early wage services don’t ask for tips, but they may begin to if regulators allow it in the future, Andrew Kushner, policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, told Vox.
The fees can push low-wage workers into a vicious cycle of reborrowing. “Any time there’s a fee involved in that — even a small one — that’s going to add up. And at the end of the day, all you’ve done is added more fees to your budget rather than have any greater ability to handle expenses,” Saunders said. “For low-wage workers, even a few dollars are a meal.”
In theory, early wage access programs are best used as a one-off, to cover an unexpected expense or budget shortfall. But once workers start using it, they tend to start needing it for every paycheck, trapping them in a cycle of needing a cash advance every pay period, Farahi said.
Some research suggests that wage access users repeatedly turn to these services after they’re introduced. A March 2022 paper by Harvard and Yale researchers, examining data from the Mexican fintech firm Minu, found that 40 percent of workers who began using early wage access continued to use it afterward.
Another June 2023 survey from Harvard researchers found that only a quarter of respondents used direct-to-consumer early wage access apps to cover emergencies or unexpected expenses, while three-quarters rely on such services to pay for regular expenses like groceries, rent, gas, and childcare.
Of the survey respondents who used early wage access apps in the past year, a third said they used them a few times a year, while 21 percent said they used them once a month and 16 percent used them twice a month or twice a week.
“Because people are likely to have to keep taking these out, then what sounds like a really short-term loan can end up being a longer-term loan, [a] longer-term cycle. And that’s where we see the similarities of payday loans,” Farahi said.
Regulators are eyeing the earned wage industry
Because early wage access apps are so new, financial regulators haven’t settled on how to classify and govern them. Many states have lending laws, such as interest rate limits or disclosure regulations, that may apply to wage access services if they’re legally considered loans. “Lending laws have a lot of important protections to protect people against problems that credit can create,” Saunders said.
In 2019, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), along with financial regulators from 10 other states and Puerto Rico, launched a multi-state probe into the payroll advance industry to investigate allegations that it was collecting illegally high interest and fees, as well as improperly triggering overdraft fees on users’ bank accounts. When asked about the status of the inquiry, a spokesperson for DFS said it cannot comment on ongoing investigations.
In Pennsylvania, the company Activehours, Inc., better known as the early wage access app EarnIn, is facing a lawsuit alleging that its interest rates, fees, and other charges exceed the state’s maximum interest rate of 6 percent. The suit also alleges that customers can’t figure out how to opt out of tipping the company for its services. Activehours did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, the earned wage access industry is trying to head off regulatory scrutiny. Last year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a prominent conservative lawmaking group that writes draft legislation for state governments, created the “Earned Wage Access Act,” a proposed law intended to soften regulation of the wage access industry. It would exclude early wage access services from the definition of credit and prevent them from requiring credit scores or reporting customers’ payment history to credit bureaus, essentially exempting them from lending laws that protect consumers.
ALEC didn’t respond to Vox’s request for comment about which states it’s trying to push the bill in, but Missouri and Nevada have passed legislation modeled on the bill, and a handful of mostly red states are considering similar laws, Bloomberg Law reported last month.
For the early wage industry, it’s critical to avoid being defined as credit because that would make it subject to state and federal credit regulations, such as caps on fees or interest rates, Saunders said. The ALEC bill would create “a gigantic loophole” in state lending laws, she said, enabling a new form of payday loan available at the click of a button that comes with predatory annual interest rates of 150 percent to 500 percent.
Connecticut has passed legislation defining early wage services as loans, and California is working on rules that would do the same, Bloomberg Law reported.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun taking enforcement actions in the early wage space. Last year, the agency rescinded a provisional approval order that had safeguarded the early wage provider Payactiv, which partners with employers, from liability under the Truth in Lending Act, a federal law that protects consumers from unfair credit practices. A CFPB spokesperson did not say whether the agency would take more enforcement actions in this area, but told Vox it intends to clarify what is considered credit under current laws.
Just pay people enough to live
The early wage access industry has emerged because so many Americans aren’t paid enough, and they aren’t paid quickly enough. There’s frequently a lag of several days between when employees complete their work and when they get paid, making many workers reach for early pay apps.
The US still largely lacks the ability to make instant, real-time payments between bank accounts — a technology that’s widely available in many other countries — which means it can take longer for workers to get paid. Slow bank payments “have very significant wealth effects for low-wage workers,” said Elena Botella, author of Delinquent: Inside America’s Debt Machine. Fintech companies have stepped in to fill that void with early wage apps, offering workers faster access to their earnings for steep fees.
The Federal Reserve launched its own US instant payments system, called FedNow on July 20, which could speed up the delivery of paychecks to workers.
Though a faster payment system would benefit workers, the financial services sector has benefited somewhat from America’s slow payments system through bank overdraft fees and check-cashing services. Banks with more than $1 billion in assets generated $1.4 billion in overdraft-related fees in Q1 2023, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence Report released in May.
Banks can also ease the burden on low-income people by not clearing low-wage workers’ paychecks at a slower pace than higher earners, said Botella, who formerly worked at Capital One and now is principal at Omidyar Network. If a customer has overdrawn their account in the past, some banks will delay how soon they can access the funds as part of their fraud mitigation efforts — but this ultimately can push low-income workers toward alternatives, like wage access apps, that will get them paid faster, Botella added.
The more obvious, more permanent solution is to pay workers a living wage, Saunders said. Early wage access shouldn’t be viewed as an “escape hatch” that makes it easier for employers to pay subpar wages. “Employers have a moral imperative to pay their workers a living wage to enable the essential workers that support us all to live on what they’re being paid,” she said. “Giving people the opportunity to borrow from next week’s paycheck because this week is not enough — it’s not a substitute for a living wage.”
The reporting for this story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Lessons from a summer of hellish flights.
More than 240 million people in the US flew somewhere between June and Labor Day, according to the Transportation Security Administration — about 7 million more than in summer 2019.
Air travel is back. But it’s most definitely not back to normal.
Horror stories of interminable delays and vacation-wrecking cancellations came from every corner of the country this summer — caused not just by storms and extreme heat, but also labor shortages. Befuddlement at how much pricier it has become to fly mounted, too.
For travelers, taking to the skies feels like it has reached a nadir. Not only were there bigger crowds and more delays to contend with at airports, but when delays happened, they caused more stress than usual. A recent Forbes Advisor survey of 2,000 travelers found that 61 percent had experienced a flight delay or cancellation this summer, and most of that 61 percent lost some money due to the delay — cash lost on prepaid hotel rooms, missed cruises, parking fees, and even kenneling pets.
Some of the problems are a temporary bump in the runway as the industry gets used to high numbers of travelers again, but some of the most deep-seated causes of passenger disgruntlement might be here to stay.
“Things that may not have upended the entire system in the past — thunderstorms on the East Coast in the afternoon — now seem to have ripple effects throughout the entire system,” says John Breyault, who is the vice president of fraud policy at the National Consumers League and leads its airline advocacy program. “I think that’s symptomatic of a system that is really overtaxed in every way.”
Here’s what we learned from this summer’s travel debacles:
Climate change is straining a fragile industry
Mass flight delays and cancellations happen because of bad weather. Thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, or even extreme heat aren’t new, but record-breaking temperatures and more frequent weather disasters in the past year added stress on the air travel industry. In December 2022 and July 2023, a series of storms across the country caused a torrent of flight delays that stranded thousands of passengers during busy holiday seasons. Last month, as Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida, more than 1,000 flights were delayed across the South.
The weather this summer did more than create delays; it laid bare just how unprepared the aviation industry is for handling any shocks. Weaknesses that might have gone unnoticed by passengers before — like aging, sparse fleets, or difficult conditions for workers, such as extreme heat — suddenly became glaringly obvious, adding to the cascading effects of bad weather and creating disruptions lasting for days. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that consumer complaints against airlines have soared by more than 300 percent since 2019. (The most common type of complaint was not getting the refund for canceled flights, which airlines are required to give. The second most common was flight delays and cancellations.)
A single hour-long delay might not seem like a huge deal, but the problem is amplified when airlines are overscheduled — one late flight bumps all the others after it — and when there aren’t enough planes or staff across various airports to accommodate a sudden change in plans. In its most recent earnings call, United Airlines said that its thousands of delays and cancellations in the leadup to the Fourth of July holiday had cost the company 1 point of profit margin for the entire quarter. According to trade association Airlines for America, flight delays in 2022 likely cost the industry billions of dollars.
“We are getting a very real preview of what our new normal will be like for summer travel,” says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group. “The first storm tosses Humpty Dumpty off the wall, but sequential storms make it harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
The labor shortage is sky high
There’s still a widespread shortage of workers in the industry, including pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, and air traffic controllers. Airline employment data from June 2023 shows higher numbers than June 2019, but the industry is still clamoring for more workers. Currently, according to one estimate, US airlines need 8,000 more pilots to fulfill demand. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be more than 16,000 job openings for pilots and flight attendants each year between now and 2032.
A labor shortfall becomes especially apparent when something goes wrong: When there aren’t enough people to fill crucial jobs, everything has to slow down, or else risk disaster. A recent New York Times report revealed that near-crashes between planes taking off and landing have become more common because of mistakes by air traffic controllers, who are overstrained amid chronic staff shortages. The Federal Aviation Administration has hired 1,500 air traffic controllers this year, but still wants to hire 1,800 more next year.
Flight delays weren’t just more common. They were more irritating.
While there have been more delays this year than usual, cancellations are actually down. According to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (which currently only has numbers through May), 20.8 percent of flights were delayed so far in 2023, compared to 18.8 percent in 2019. The average length of delay in 2023 is 53 minutes, just 3 minutes longer than in 2019, according to flight tracking site Flight Aware.
So what’s creating such horrid air travel vibes? One possibility is that there are more travelers now than in 2019, but fewer commercial aircraft are flying, meaning passengers have fewer chances to reroute or get on the next flight when delays happen, leaving them stuck in limbo longer. When over 15,000 flights were axed during the infamous Southwest cancellations last winter, not only outdated tech, but also aggressive overscheduling created a huge domino effect on the system. Delays can have serious consequences for travelers, not just causing people to miss important life events, but in some cases limiting their access to food and water while they’re stuck on a plane for hours. American Airlines was recently fined a record $4 million for hours-long tarmac delays during which it did not allow passengers to deplane.
Extra fees feel unavoidable, and they’re here to stay
Over 22 million more travelers crowded the airports this summer than last — some of them flying for the first time in years — and many were freshly reminded of what’s now the industry standard of nickel-and-diming passengers for checking bags and choosing seats. In the early 2000s, it was mostly ultra-low-cost carriers charging extra to check luggage. But since then, even full-service US carriers are creating basic economy fares that tack on bag and seat fees.
“Drip pricing” for services that used to be included with airfare only piles onto the exasperation travelers feel. According to an analysis by the airline consultancy IdeaWorks, top US airlines demand $33 on average for a preferred seat (which is usually closer to the front of the plane), $48 for an exit-row seat (where there’s more leg room) and $18 for a last-row seat. These are “junk fees” to consumers and the White House, but to airlines, they’re a cash cow. Take United, which made a record $1 billion in revenue just from bags and seats fees from April to June. Having multiple types of seat upgrades “is a key driver of our revenue growth,” United executive Andrew Nocella said in the company’s most recent earnings call. And just look at baggage fees: Last year, top airlines made about $6.7 billion in baggage fees, a spike from the $5.7 billion they made in 2019, despite more flyers that year.
Airline perks and deals were harder to come by
The race to the bottom isn’t going unnoticed by travelers. Flying is becoming more stratified; class divisions feel more heightened than ever, and having frequent flyer status with an airline is more valuable. Airlines know this too, and in response to an inundation of passengers attaining “elite” status, many have upped the threshold to join, limiting airport lounge access to higher membership levels or raising lounge fees.
“I have spoken with airline managers and executives who have said that part of the reason that the standard coach product is so bad is intentional,” says Harteveldt. “They want to get more people paying extra and trading up to a better product. America can claim to be egalitarian, but that claim ends at the airport door.”
Airfare has dropped since reaching new highs last summer, but is still elevated. “This has been one of the worst years I can ever remember for flight deals,” says Ben Mutzabaugh, senior aviation editor at The Points Guy, a popular travel site. Meanwhile, leisure travelers with disposable income have shown a surprising willingness to spend. “A lot of times they’re willing to just buy business-class tickets — we see much more of that now than we did before the pandemic.”
The stark contrast in travel experience between the haves and have-nots may be fomenting resentment on one end and arrogance on the other. Airports and even flights are becoming an all-too-common setting for viral videos of travelers losing their tempers.
Reports of “unruly passengers” — people airlines report for causing a disturbance on flights — skyrocketed amid mask mandates in 2021, almost reaching 6,000 reports, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. In 2019, there were just 1,161.
This is the new normal — unless airlines are forced to change
Some of the annoyances travelers experienced this summer will remain unavoidable in coming months. Increasingly frequent bad weather will keep walloping flights; that’s the reality of the climate crisis.
Airlines have learned some lessons from this summer’s onslaught of demand. The biggest are to hire more workers and have more spare planes on the ground in case of emergencies, but also to leave more slack in scheduling flights. Airlines have been on a hiring spree, and experts say the worst of the pilot shortage will probably be over by next summer.
But some of the other bugbears of air travel — like airlines’ worst anti-consumer practices — aren’t likely to go away without antitrust action. Much of what we hate about taking to the skies today can be blamed on industry consolidation after the airlines were deregulated in the late 1970s. A handful of airlines — United, Delta, American, and Southwest — control about 80 percent of the domestic market. “Since the government let the industry become a permanent oligopoly, there is zero risk that competition will discipline fee increases,” Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst, told Vox in an email.
The Biden administration has signaled a desire to rein in airlines’ worst practices, voicing support for a policy requiring airlines to disclose all fees from the beginning of a fare search rather than showing a deceptive base fare that will significantly rise as seat and bag fees are added. The administration has also urged Congress to mandate airlines to seat families together for free. But these rules don’t actually exist yet. (A few airlines have voluntarily offered free family seating.)
Under Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Department of Transportation has revved up its enforcement actions; not only did it order American to pay up, the department has also been levying millions in fines to airlines that didn’t refund customers in a timely manner. Breyault, of the National Consumers League, says that these are steps in the right direction but that the DOT hasn’t used the full force of its authority. By the NCL’s accounting, the frequency of enforcement and the amount of money fined has decreased over the years. Breyault calls even the historic $4 million fine “a rounding error to a company the size of American.”
A flight delay doesn’t have to entirely ruin a vacation, and maybe we don’t have to pay an arm and a leg just to have a pleasant flying experience. But if flying during the high season continues to be awful, that could turn off customers and ultimately dampen demand.
“I don’t think that this is sustainable,” says Breyault.