Business Travel Coalition (BTC) and FlyersRights.org today applauded FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt’s decision to require FAA staff to cease referring to airlines as customers of the agency, long a concern of travel organizations. The dysfunction caused by this misguided notion of airlines-as-customer is deeply rooted in FAA culture; the Customer Service Initiative was merely one manifestation.

 

Bloomberg News reported yesterday: “FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, who has been in his job for less than four months, said at a news conference today, ‘When we say customer, we’re talking about the flying public. There has been some confusion in the past.’”

BTC and FlyersRights.org believe FAA should completely remove the term “customer” from its lexicon as it will no doubt remain as a trigger for confused behavior as FAA culture still supports the airlines-as-customer construct. FAA needs to be a strong regulator with a mission to protect the flying public, period. Moreover, and importantly, politically favored and powerful airlines should not be overseen any differently than smaller or less politically connected ones. 

 

About BTC

Founded in 1994, the mission of Business Travel Coalition is to bring transparency to industry and government policies and practices so that customers can influence issues of strategic importance to their organizations.

About FlyersRights.org

FlyersRights.org is the largest non-profit airline passenger advocacy group in the world with 27,000 members and broad support from U.S. national consumer groups, several unions, including IAM and NATCA, as well as Business Travel Coalition. The FlyersRights.org mission is to advocate the safety, health, wellbeing and dignity of airline passengers.