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Jul 26, 2026
Airlines Want To Lie About Their Ticket Prices
Airlines Want To Lie About Their Ticket Prices
00:00
12:24
Transcript
0:00
Hey, Aiden, I found you a flight to London. How much? Oh, you're gonna love the price. It's just one cent. One cent? What's the catch? Do I have to sit in a kennel in the cargo hold? Actually, it's even worse than that.
0:14
Well, hey, let's not jump to conclusions. I never said I didn't wanna be in a kennel. Here's the deal. It's not a real price. Well, then what's the real price? Well, it's a lot higher, like hundreds of dollars higher.
0:25
But that doesn't seem to matter to the government. It's got a proposal to let airlines advertise airfares at just one penny a piece. But there's some good news.
0:34
You can stop this, and we're gonna tell you how in a moment. [pensive music] Welcome to the LA Confidential podcast.
0:43
Now, we normally take a consumer problem, we tell you what went wrong and how to fix it, but today's consumer problem is a little bit different because it affects all of us, and the solution is up to you.
0:55
And this week, the case has no single victim. The victim is anyone who flies. The Department of Transportation is attempting to allow airlines to advertise any price before the addition of a variety of junk fees.
1:09
Until now, they've had to include all elements of their pricing, minus baggage fees, in any advertising context. Yeah, it's called the Full Fare Advertising rule.
1:19
The public comments have already been coming in on this one, and as you can imagine, people are not happy. I've got a name for this case. We're calling it the DOT can suck my [beep]. [laughs] Oh, God.
1:33
Not much of a title and more just a, a statement of opinion. Yeah, right. So a little history first. Aiden, do you remember what it was like to book a flight before 2011? Of course. I remember it like it was yesterday.
1:45
Well, okay, you were six years old. That explains why there was so much leg room back then.
1:49
Just as a refresher, you were able to go online and find a $99 fare, which looked like a steal, and then you'd click on it, and then the airline would start adding surcharges, and those would get added through the rest of the booking process.
2:03
You'd have, like, a carrier-imposed surcharge, a mandatory fuel surcharge, and meanwhile, the taxes would stay hidden until that final screen. It was like a horror movie where they wait until the end and then ooga booga.
2:18
Like Five Nights at Freddy's. I am familiar. Fares like these would routinely double as you went through the booking process, and it happened every single time.
2:28
It made people furious, and eventually the DOT did something about it.
2:33
In 2011, it adopted the Full Fare rule I was telling you about, and it said the price that the airline displays first has to be a price that you pay, including all the taxes and fees.
2:45
The airlines did not take this news very well. They sued and lost. For the last 15 years, you've always gotten the full fare for your ticket wherever you book it, which brings us to today.
2:57
A new administration has decided to revisit this regulation. Two options are on the table. One is bad, and the other is worse. But before we get to that, here's a question worth asking. Who even wants this?
3:10
I mean, who wakes up and says, "Gee, DOT, I'd like a murkier airfare"?
3:15
Well, a woman in Des Moines who was writing in the comments put that exact question to the government, and her answer is better than anything I could write. I'll have details on that in just a minute.
3:25
[upbeat music] Here's the first bad option. Under the current rule, the total price has to be the most prominent number in any airfare ad.
3:37
Airlines can itemize taxes and fees if they want, but nothing gets to be more prominent than the real total. The DOT now calls that, and I'm quoting the actual proposal here, "unnecessarily prescriptive."
3:51
Its fix would let airlines display every component just as prominently as the total, so the $99 fare and the $180 fare I was telling you about before would sit side by side at the same font size, and you get to figure out which one is real.
4:08
It's a fun game you get to play with the airline. Hey, airline, is this the $99 or $180? No, you have to guess. It's, like, a fun game. That's not a very fun game. That's not fun. I'm, uh, I don't...
4:22
I wanna know what the price is. Oh, it's not fun for you, but it's fun for us. [explosion] Most people would look at that and they'd go, "Oh, look.
4:30
Here, see, an 89, $99," and they would look and they would see the other price maybe floating around somewhere else on the page, and they would assume that the 89 or $99 fare is the right one, which is ridiculous.
4:41
Yeah, I don't wanna play Price is Right every time I'm buying an airline ticket. [upbeat music] It gets better.
4:50
The change would also erase nine guidance documents that explain how the rule works in practice, including one that specifically stops airlines from lying and labeling their own surcharges as taxes.
5:03
This means that an airline can invent a fee, then dress up that fee as a tax.
5:08
Now you can add one more item to your list of things you blame the government for, right alongside faking the moon landing and hiding the ice wall at the edge of the flat Earth.
5:16
Yeah, because no one is gonna argue about a tax. They're just gonna say, "Well, it's tax. I have to pay it," even if it's not actually a tax. Yeah, and everyone hates the government, so, like, you know.
5:27
Not as much as they hate podcasters. [laughs] Okay. Well, you know what? Actually, nowadays, podcasters are our government. That's merely the bad option.
5:36
The worse one is buried deeper in the proposal, where the DOT mentions it's also considering repealing the entire Full Fare rule.
5:45
Meaning airlines could once again advertise a fare that leaves out the taxes and fees entirely. Now it's not even a fun guessing game. They're just gouging your eyes out so you're blind to the final price.
5:58
If you wanna know what that world looks like, somebody already showed us. That's an interesting way of putting it, Aiden. Which brings us to Jason.
6:06
He's an aviation data journalist, and he priced out a real JetBlue itinerary from New York to London and filed the whole thing as a public comment on the government website.
6:17
It's what he thinks the fare displays might look like if the regulations go through. In his example, the total price is $314 for a ticket.
6:26
Of that, government taxes were $33, and the carrier-imposed fee was 250, but the base fare, the part that's actually the airfare, was only $31.
6:38
And Jason's point is that under the new rule, an airline could theoretically advertise a dramatically lower rate, lower than the $31, possibly even down to just one cent.
6:50
This begs the question: what am I getting for the $250? Is the $31 for the flight and the 250 so they'll let me on the flight?
6:59
Well, that's why this podcast is titled The One Cent Flight to London, because there are no one-cent flights, period.
7:06
And without the full fare rule, nothing stops an airline from selling base fares at a penny and then hiding the rest as taxes and fees.
7:15
A one-cent flight to London would have been a deal right up until you actually try to buy it. [upbeat music] Now, about those public comments.
7:28
The docket has been out for a couple of weeks, and the traveling public has, shall we say, noticed. Let me read you a few word for word, along with the names and the hometowns of these people.
7:40
Eric in Woodinville, Washington says, "Showing a price that you cannot purchase is deceptive." He went on to call the whole proposal, quote, "profoundly anti-consumer." Cheryl from Des Moines asked, "Who benefits?"
7:53
Her answer: quote, "It certainly would not be the airline customers." Notice nobody is writing in from the other side. There's no comments here that say, "Please, I beg of you, give me less information about my airfare."
8:09
In fact, just before we sat down to record this, Aiden, A4A, Airlines for America, filed a comment asking for an extension.
8:17
So in addition to bending the truth about their airfares, the airlines want more time to put together their arguments in support of this wrongheaded rule.
8:27
Then there's Andrew in Phoenix, who filed what I believe is the shortest comment in the docket. Just four words. Quote, "What a dumb change."
8:35
But save your applause for Andrea in Ohio, because she's the one who named the actual stakes. Quote, "For those of us who do not travel regularly and have limited funds, knowing a flight's total cost up front is vital."
8:49
She's got a really good point. If you're an experienced air traveler and any of these new rules pass, you're gonna wanna show up with a calculator when you're doing your airfare shopping.
9:00
But most of the inexperienced travelers, you know, the ones who just maybe fly once or twice a year, they're not gonna know anything about this, and they're gonna get ambushed at the end with more fees.
9:10
Yeah, and we've had to deal with so much BS over the years, you'd think we'd be in the business of fertilizer. But picture the family that flies once a year.
9:19
They see the low fare, they build the vacation budget around it, and the real price mugs them at the register at gunpoint. Those are the people the current regulation protects.
9:28
Meanwhile, here's what the rest of the world is doing, because I think the timing here is really interesting. A week ago, the European Union gave final approval to stronger air passenger rights.
9:40
Among them, airlines now have to show you the fare with a carryon bag included before you even start the booking. The DOT's defense is that the existing rule might clash with the First Amendment.
9:53
Quite the interesting argument. They also mention that a tax law from the 1970s already handles how taxes get displayed and shouldn't be applied just to airlines. Pause.
10:05
Let's talk about that tax law from the 1970s for a second. That's the same law that allows any merchant to withhold the price of taxes until you buy the product.
10:15
And I don't know about you guys, but I've never met a single person who's told me about how much they love getting stuck with taxes at the end of a transaction.
10:23
But telling people what a flight costs before they buy it is about the most common sense regulation ever written. In fact, it shouldn't even need to exist. Airlines should tell the truth about their fares, always.
10:38
[upbeat music] So how does this one end? Well, here's what makes this episode different from all the others we've done. Usually, we tell you how my team got someone's money back.
10:53
Today, the case is still open, and the ending is up to you. Because none of this is final. It's a proposal. And by law, the DOT has to read and consider the public's feedback before it acts.
11:06
Every comment is on the record. But where do we send our complaints? Regulations.gov. The docket number is DOT-OST-2025-0831. Anyone can file. It takes about two minutes. You don't even need a law degree.
11:23
The window closes on July 31st, and here's the thing to understand about that deadline. The airlines are counting on silence. They're betting that you'll just shrug and take it up the [beep].
11:35
One other thing to mention about regulations.gov is, uh, giving personal comments works best. So if you have a personal anecdote to say about this law, go ahead.
11:48
Yeah, like if you booked a ticket before 2011 and you remember the bad old days, say something about that, by all means. You can prove them wrong about taking it up the [beep]. You have one more week.
11:59
The comment box is open. If you've got a consumer problem you can't solve, we are at elliottadvocacy.org. My email address is
[email protected]
.
12:09
And if you need somebody to take it up the [beep], my email is
[email protected]
. [laughs] [upbeat music]
Elliott Confidential
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