This Valentine’s Day marks the first anniversary of the passenger rights revolution. It will probably also be its last — unless you do something about it.Who can forget that icy February afternoon in New York when travelers were stuck on planes for up to 10 hours? People were outraged. The chief executive of one airline, JetBlue Airways, lost his job. And Kate Hanni, a real estate agent who had been trapped on a flight several weeks earlier, became a celebrity lobbyist with a mandate to re-regulate the airline industry.
For a few months, it looked like the revolution would succeed. With record delays and cancellations during the summer, and plummeting customer-service ratings, it seemed air carriers had become the most effective proponents of new laws that would essentially force them to behave — something they should have been doing all along.
But appearances can be deceiving. Meanwhile, the airline industry’s influential lobbyists worked behind the scenes to water down the proposed passenger rights legislation and fight every meaningful initiative designed to improve the plight of their customers.
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