U.S. airlines are now required to provide passengers with an automatic refund for canceled or significantly delayed flights and for services that were paid for but not provided, such as Wi-Fi or entertainment.
“Passengers deserve to get their money back when an airline owes them — without headaches or haggling. Today, our automatic refund rule goes into effect. Airlines are required to provide immediate cash refunds without passengers having to ask,” wrote Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Monday (28) in a post on the social platform X.
The Department of Transportation proposed the rule in April. Previously, airlines could decide how long a delay could last before issuing refunds. Under the rule, a significant delay is defined as lasting at least three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international flights.
The Department of Transportation stated that passengers should be refunded within seven business days if they purchased a ticket with a credit card and 20 calendar days if they used a different payment method.
The regulation also allows passengers to obtain refunds for checked baggage fees if the bag is lost and not delivered within 12 hours of the arrival gate of a domestic flight, while international flights will have 15 to 30 hours to return a lost bag, depending on the flight duration, Bloomberg reported.
Source: The Hill