About ten years ago, airline greed reached a new low when every carrier in the nation refused to waive seating fees for families with young children to sit together inflight.
I was at the center of the fight against it for a decade. At times, it seemed common sense and common decency would never win. But thankfully, the worst junk fee of all will soon be eliminated.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a rulemaking that would ban airlines from charging fees for parents and caregivers to sit with kids 13 and under. While the news was more than welcome, it was not unexpected: In May 2024, President Biden signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, whereby Congress specifically gave the DOT the power to force the airlines to stop the madness.
And the fees are not chump change. As the DOT notes, they could add up to at least $200 round-trip for a family of four.
For years, government didn’t act to seat families together
In the mid-2010s, I was an airline passenger advocate for Consumer Reports (CR) and received a letter from a parent whom a major airline had assigned a seat apart from her 4-year-old. I started working in the airlines in 1985, and in all the subsequent years of writing and advocating about the industry, I’d never heard about such a thing happening, particularly after 9/11, when U.S. carriers began soliciting every passenger’s date of birth.
Who would seat a toddler alone?
Turns out all our domestic airlines would, and they did.
The more we dug at CR, the worse it got. Stories started pouring in, and for years this issue generated attention. We wrote about it in USA Today and spoke about it with countless media outlets. We fought this insanity in every way we could: podcasts; press releases; and a petition generating 163,000 signatures. We wrote to the DOT and airlines themselves, and I even testified about family seating before Congress.
Meanwhile, there was bipartisan anger in both the House and Senate. I recall my CR colleagues and I talking about this problem on the Hill with Congressional members from both ends of the political spectrum.
One thing about the airlines’ greed is that it certainly crosses the blue-red divide and unites us all. After several bills were introduced, the right to family seating finally made its way into the 2016 FAA Reauthorization Act. The story should have ended there, 8 years ago.
Unfortunately, the outgoing Obama Administration and the incoming Trump Administration failed to act. For years, consumer organizations repeatedly met to ask the DOT why it wasn’t responding to the Congressional mandate to “review and, if appropriate, establish a policy” directing airlines to waive seating fees for 13-and-unders.
Eventually, Secretary Elaine Chao’s team under the Trump Administration told us there was no need to heed Congress because of the “low number of complaints” from families.
So in 2018, CR filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOT and a year later in 2019, we received 136 complaints concerning virtually every U.S. airline over two years. I was shocked by what the DOT had cavalierly dismissed. Consider:
• There were cases involving separate seat assignments for 3-year-olds, 2-year-olds, and—yes!—in two cases, 1-year-olds.
• Some of these children separated from their families were autistic, suffered seizures, or had life-threatening nut allergies.
• Concerns were raised not only about health issues, but also over safety (such as during emergency evacuations) and children’s welfare (such as repeated FBI reports about in-flight sexual assaults).
• Airline policies failed at every phase, as carriers failed to address these concerns during booking, at check-in counters, gates, and on board.
• Other passengers were continually inconvenienced by being asked to swap seats, and numerous altercations broke out between passengers and flight attendants. One parent complained families were “depending on the kindness of strangers.”
Meanwhile, no domestic airlines volunteered to waive such fees and waivers were termed “impossible.” In August 2019, a DOT official stated concerns that a regulation “doesn’t impose undue burdens” on airlines. Yet it expressed no concerns about undue burdens on us: children, parents, and adjacent passengers.
The DOT finally moves to protect family seating on flights
The incoming Biden Administration expressed interest in the problem, and in 2021 DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with advocates so we could lay out our case for a new rule. Shortly after, the DOT introduced a “Family Seating Dashboard” that so far has spurred four carriers—Alaska, American, Frontier, and JetBlue—to voluntarily waive family seating fees.
Finally, the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act was signed by President Biden in May, prohibiting airlines from charging seating fees for families with kids. Last week, Buttigieg introduced the rulemaking that will implement it.
Will airlines fight back and perhaps sue the DOT, as they have done over numerous issues, including most recently the Department’s new flight refunds rule? Perhaps. It doesn’t make much sense to fight a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional resolution. But then, charging toddlers to sit with their parents never made much sense anyway.
How the airline family seating rule will become final
The good news is there’s action at last. The bad news is government rules take time.
If you’re traveling on Alaska, American, Frontier, or JetBlue and encounter seating difficulties with children, cite the DOT Dashboard and each airline’s own Contract of Carriage. Such contracts are binding and the DOT can enforce them, so on these four airlines, you should already be able to sit together without an extra charge.
If you’re on any other U.S. airline, help is coming—but there’s no firm timeline yet.
Last week, the DOT issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. In the NPRM, the Department lays out the case for this regulation and asserts how it has the authority to act.
The notice will be filed in the Federal Register this week (and we will update this link accordingly then). Once that happens, the public is welcome to comment and consumers like you will have 60 days to weigh in. It’s worth noting that “any interested party may file a petition to hold a hearing on the proposed rule prior to the close of the comment period.” If the airlines request such a hearing, the rulemaking could be delayed.
The wheels of government grind slowly. But thankfully in this case, the grinding has begun. At long last!
William J. McGee is the Senior Fellow for Aviation & Travel at American Economic Liberties Project. An FAA-licensed aircraft dispatcher, he spent seven years in airline flight operations management and was Editor-in-Chief of Consumer Reports Travel Letter. He is the author of Attention All Passengers and teaches at Vaughn College of Aeronautics. There is more at www.economicliberties.us/william-mcgee/.
