USA

Following a complaint from two Alitalia passengers whose flights were canceled, the Department’s Aviation Enforcement Office investigated the carrier’s refusal to pay cash compensation to the passengers. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) now fined  Alitalia USD 125,000 for providing inaccurate information on its website regarding its policy on compensation to passengers on delayed and cancelled flights. 

As a result of an in-flight, Boeing 787 battery incident in Japan, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded Boeing 787 Dreamliners over safety concerns. Other regulators around the world have followed:

Three airlines have challenged the Transportation Department’s new price-advertising rule nefore the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that the DOT is violating the First Amendment by prohibiting airlines from advertising base prices net of taxes and fees. The airlines also claim that the DOT has been violating the Airline Deregulation Act by imposing unique requirements such as “the size of typeface and the length of mandatory refunds — in an industry that Congress expressly chose to deregulate.”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned 22 hotel operators that their online reservation sites may violate the law by providing a deceptively low estimate of what consumers can expect to pay for their hotel rooms. According to the FTC letters, one common complaint consumers raised involved mandatory fees hotels charge for amenities such as newspapers, use of onsite exercise or pool facilities, or internet access, sometimes referred to as ‘resort fees'.