USDOT Fights Junk Fees With New Family Seating Dashboard

On March 6, 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) shared a new family seating dashboard designed to help parents avoid paying family seating junk fees while flying with their children. The new tool highlights which airlines offer fee-free family seating and which ones don’t, removing the guesswork for family travelers.

“Parents traveling with young kids should be able to sit together without an airline forcing them to pay junk fees,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “We have been pressing airlines to guarantee family seating without tacking on extra charges, and now we’re seeing some airlines start to make this common-sense change. All airlines should do this promptly, even as we move forward to develop a rule establishing this as a requirement across the board.”

The new tool is an early initiative in the USDOT’s work to ban family seating junk fees. As recently as February 2023, no U.S. airlines guaranteed fee-free family seating. However, after pressure from the USDOT and the Biden Administration to crack down on junk fees airlines are making changes to improve their customer service. Frontier Airlines was among the first to nix the fees and other airlines like American Airlines and Alaska Airlines have quickly followed suit to “guarantee that parents can sit with their young children without getting nickel and dimed,” as the USDOT put it in a March 6 press release.

“This new dashboard allows parents to sidestep airlines’ confusing claims on family seating,” said the USDOT. “To receive a green check on the dashboard, an airline must guarantee that parents can sit next to children age 13 and younger for free if adjacent seats are available when they book. And they must include that guarantee as part of their customer service plan so that it is backstopped by USDOT enforcement if they fail to deliver.”

As for the remaining airlines that don’t guarantee adjacent seating for parents and young children at no extra cost, the USDOT is working with the President to send Congress proposed legislation over the coming weeks.