Our Objective(s)
To assess the Department of Transportation's (DOT) (1) process for reviewing consumer complaints for airline ticket refunds and (2) efforts to hold airlines accountable for providing timely refunds to consumers.
Why This Audit
As the airline industry began to respond to and recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it experienced an increase in flight delays, cancellations, and consumer requests for airline ticket refunds. Increased flight delays and cancellations resulted in DOT receiving substantially more consumer complaints about airlines' failure to provide ticket refunds. Given DOT's responsibility to regulate and enforce consumer protection laws along with the airline ticket refund complaints remaining significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, we initiated this audit.
What We Found
The Office of Aviation Consumer Protection (OACP) revised its consumer complaint review process after refund-related complaints significantly increased during the pandemic.
OACP received over 139,000 refund complaints between 2020 and 2022. In 2019 there were 15,332 complaints, including 1,568 refund complaints.
In spring 2020, OACP stopped analyzing every airline response to consumer complaints to determine substantiveness and identifying whether every airline had a pattern of violations to refer to the attorneys for potential investigation. Instead, according to OACP, it conducted sample reviews of consumer complaints to determine airlines' compliance with consumer protection requirements and investigate airlines that OACP considered problematic.
In January 2021, OACP streamlined analysts' pandemic case coding by reducing the number of codes to improve consistency. Later, OACP officials stopped coding airline consumer complaints due to high volume and staffing limitations.
As of April 2025, OACP has not resumed analyzing airline responses to consumer complaints, which conflicts with several requirements. While OACP plans to use a new cloud-based system to aid complaint analysis, the launch has been delayed by more than a year.
OACP relies on airlines' self-certification of refund data to determine credits and offsets to civil penalties.
OACP assessed civil penalties of over $155 million to 14 airlines for failing to provide prompt refunds without verifying the accuracy of refund data from the airlines.
OACP is at risk of inaccurately crediting and offsetting civil penalty amounts and not deterring airlines from violating consumer protection regulations.
Recommendations
We made 2 recommendations to improve OACP's process for reviewing consumer complaints for airline ticket refunds and their efforts to hold airlines accountable for providing timely refunds to consumers.
