Nine million reasons to read this story

The airline industry forgot how to issue refunds in 2020. Don't become a statistic this year.

Nine million airline passengers.

That's how many people had a complaint about ticket refunds last year, new numbers from the Department of Transportation (DOT) suggest. A staggering 89,518 air travelers wanted their money back from an airline in 2020 — a 5,687 percent increase from the previous year. 

But that figure, which is thought to represent only 1 …