Online Petition Unifies Fed Up Flyers

by  Molly Fergus | Sep 22, 2010
Plane in sky
Plane in sky / AlexeyPetrov/iStock

Grumpy flyers, put on your game faces: Three U.S. travel associations (the Consumer Travel Alliance, the Business Travel Coalition, and the American Society of Travel Agents) have dubbed tomorrow, September 23, “Mad As Hell Day,” the first leg of protest in an ongoing campaign against the seemingly endless onslaught of airline fees.

The initiative comes a little more than three weeks after the associations teamed up to launch MadAsHellAboutHiddenFees.com, a website responding to the traveling public’s collective annoyance with hidden, unexpected, and undisclosed airline fees.

The site features videos and horror stories from passengers who are fed up with airline fees, but the crux of the whole operation is the online petition. The mission of the petition, which will be presented to the Department of Transportation tomorrow, is to demand that airlines be transparent and reveal all fees wherever they sell tickets.

As it stands, airlines display most of this information in fine print on their own sites, but third-party booking agents, such as travel agencies and flight search engines, don’t always factor these charges into the final ticket price. Uninformed travelers then end up strapped for cash in transit, and, apparently, mad as hell.

If you still want to speak out about this issue, it’s not too late. The petition closes for the DOT count tomorrow at 10 a.m. EST, but the online form will remain open to show continued support for the bill. Even if the campaign isn't effective, it’s clear that the movement has struck a nerve: On Monday, so many travelers rushed to sign the petition that the Mad As Hell servers crashed.

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