The U.S. Department of Transportation reported more than 5,000 complaints from consumers about airline service in April, up 14.8% from March and up 321.5% from the roughly 1,200 complaints received in April 2019.

Of the 5,079 April complaints, nearly 63% concerned U.S. carriers, about 28% concerned foreign carriers and the remaining 10%were about travel companies. 

A third of the complaints concerned refunds, while flight problems involving cancellations, delays or “other deviations from airlines’ schedules” were a close second at 31%.

Reporting carriers canceled 2.3% of their scheduled domestic flights in April, up from 1.5% in March, but lower than the 2.4% reported in April 2019, according to the DOT. Delta (1.1%), Hawaiian (1.4%) and American (1.6%) had the lowest percentage of cancellations in April while Spirit (10.3%), JetBlue (9%) and Alaska (3.8%) had the highest.

The report comes as carriers trim schedules to improve operations. Cancellations affected nearly 3,000 flights on Memorial Day weekend and nearly 3,400 on Juneteenth weekend, according to FlightAware.

Source: Business Travel News

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