FLYERTALK: The Consumer Choice Center has awarded two senators with a sarcastic Bureau of Nannyism Award (BAN) for their attempts to re-regulate the air travel industry and make flights more expensive.
Two senators have been recognized by the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), a global consumer rights body, for their efforts in making air travel more costly. Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have received September 2018’s Bureau of Nannyism (BAN) award, an accolade that, according a media statement by the CCC, wryly acknowledges, “…the work of an individual or organization that has made major contributions to advocating limits on consumer choice.”
The senators’ names are attached to a provision that is included within the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill. The bill itself is currently with the U.S. Senate, but the provision supported by Markey and Blumenthal – referred to as Forbidding Airlines from Imposing Ridiculous (FAIR) Fees Act – could, according to the CCC’s Deputy Director Yaël Ossowski, “…force airlines to abandon the successful business model that has made commercial air travel the most affordable it has been in over 20 years.”
As Ossowski explains, this level of regulation would not only harm consumers, but alter the structure of the air travel industry itself.
“Deregulation of the airline industry helped countless Americans access affordable airline travel for business, leisure, and family obligations. FAIR Fees would be a re-regulation of the U.S. airline industry and would thus lead us back to a command economy in the skies, where flights are accessible to only wealthy passengers and business travelers. That’s the opposite of where we should be heading in the 21st Century,” he states.
The CCC hopes that this month’s prize, given to bring attention to the organization’s #FreeSkiesAreFAIR campaign, will “highlight how the setting of airline prices by politicians will only lead to higher prices for flyers and will be a huge detriment to consumer choice,” explains Ossowski.
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