How To File An Air Travel Complaint With The DOT

By: Ben Schlappig

Updated: August 16, 2024
Published: June 7, 2024

14 comments

In this post I wanted to talk briefly about filing consumer complaints with the United States Department of Transportation (DOT). Why and when should you do it, what’s the process like, and what should you expect?

In this post:

When you should consider filing a DOT complaint

When things go wrong with your travels, there’s an order in which you should try to get things resolved:

If you’re actually traveling, you should first try to talk to an airline representative at the airport
If the issue doesn’t involve immediate travel or irregular operations, you should then reach out to the carrier’s customer relations department; if you don’t get a satisfactory response, respond to the email explaining you’re not happy with the response, and give the airline one more chance
If that doesn’t work, it can then make sense to email the company’s CEO, as there’s typically an “executive” customer relations department that these emails get forwarded to

Unfortunately so many airlines have now automated customer relations, where they just copy and paste the same response to everyone (which I’m sure they’d call “AI”), or even worse, write complete gibberish.

If you’ve gone through that process and haven’t received a satisfactory resolution, you have two additional options. You can either contact the DOT and file a consumer complaint (which is super straightforward), or you can potentially pursue legal action (which is much more complicated).

Let me emphasize that a DOT complaint is intended for when passenger rights are violated, or for fairly serious issues. So I wouldn’t file a DOT complaint because a flight attendant wasn’t friendly or your business class meal wasn’t delicious.

Rather, you should file a complaint for situations where you don’t get a refund on time, if you feel you were denied boarding or downgraded and not compensated correctly, if your bags were lost, if you feel you were discriminated against, etc.

There can be value in filing a DOT complaint

How to file a DOT air travel complaint

You can file a DOT complaint at this link. The process is super straightforward — you just have to provide your name, contact information, flight information, and then a description of your inquiry or comment, which can be up to 1,000 characters. You can also add supporting documents. If you want to write more than 1,000 characters, just attach a letter as a document.

What to expect when you file a complaint

I want to set realistic expectations here. When you file a DOT complaint, it’s not like the carrier’s CEO is going to call you the next day and apologize. However, this accomplishes two important things:

A real human at the airline will actually review your case
The number of consumer complaints is tracked by the DOT, so filing a complaint sends a message to the airline you’re frustrated with, and the DOT publishes the number of complaints against airlines, and that matters

When you file a DOT complaint, the DOT forwards the request to airlines. Airlines then have up to 30 days to acknowledge the complaint, and have up to 60 days to respond to the complaint. The carrier’s response is also shared with the DOT, so the fact that the response also goes to the government should make it more serious.

I don’t want to suggest that a DOT complaint will always get you a resolution, but it’s your next best, simple option, after you feel you’ve pursued all avenues directly with an airline. And at a minimum you should feel good about filing a complaint if you’re truly dissatisfied, since the complaint will count publicly against the airline.

A DOT complaint at least gets you a real response

Bottom line

It’s common to feel like you’ve reached a dead-end with customer relations departments at airlines. In those situations, your next best option is filing a consumer complaint with the Department of Transportation. When you do this, the airline needs to respond (and typically not just an automated response), and it also counts publicly against the airline.

Have you ever filed a complaint with the DOT?

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Phil Guest

June 7, 2024, 5:03 pm

Can a non-US citizen make a complaint through DOT?

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Steve Guest

June 7, 2024, 11:14 am

There are two classes of complaints one can file with the DOT the second of which either requires an attorney or the skills of one and I presume is not what Lucky is thinking about in this post since the time and effort to argue those is only really appropriate where the intention is to get an airline to change or implement a new policy. I doubt this is the objective for most readers of this blog. More likely its that you believe you've been mistreated in some manner and are owed compensation. In that case a complaint to the DOT is pretty much a waste of time as sorting out your complaint is simply not the mandate of the DOT. However there is a forum that is designed exactly for this purpose and it's small claims court. My advice to anyone who feels they have been mistreated is to first take a long deep breath and put the matter aside for a period of time. Then some time later walk through what happened dispassionately what occurred to determine whether there really has been a failure on the airline's part to fulful their obligation and if so what exactly that obligation. Only then and only if there is a pretty good case do I suggest writing a letter laying out your argument and send it to the office of the President because there is an entire staff of people who's job it is to resolve these matters. But the key is to make sure you are in the right and that requires careful analysis of what the contract really entitles you to. Unfortunately few passengers make the effort to understand this and result is airlines receive a large volume of complaints that are without merit. If you can avoid being one of those you have a very good chance of a satisfactory outcome from the airline but if not you have exactly what you need to obtain what you are asking for by order of the court. The DOT is not the appropriate forum to resolve individual complaints however that is exactly what small claims court was created to do. If you have an issue you can't resolve with another party and you think you are on firm legal ground, take it to a judge and have them decide. That's what they are they are there for.

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RCB Guest

June 7, 2024, 10:48 am

Back in later 2020 I was owed a refund from Vietnam Airlines for a flight that had been cancelled due to Covid. Vietnam Air acknowledged they owed me money, and "processed my refund" but of course they never did, I just kept getting the run around from them. Tired of their lies, I decided to file a DOT complaint as a hail mary pass even though DOT had no juridiction since this flight was an inter-Asia flight on Vietnam, but what did I have to lose? Within a few days I got a response from DOT that said "Hey, this is not in our jurisdiction to enforce so we can't force them to do anything, but they also don't want to be on our bad side so we'll send it to them for a response and see if that shakes anything loose" and sure enough within a few weeks I had my refund. So yes, a DOT complaint can and does work, and I'm so tired of all the people speculating in comments about "the metrics won't scare an airline so they have no reason to comply" and other nonsense, just shut up and file the complaint and stop assuming the process is useless. What do you have to lose by trying?

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Susan Guest

June 7, 2024, 8:17 am

I tried for over 9 months to get resolution through the airline on a refund I was definitely owed (Iberia) and kept being met with different "groups" of customer service, multiple case numbers, phone, email, escalated, non-escalated and each person gave me different answers or punted for a later response which never came. After a couple of vehement "no" responses I felt I had no choice to go the DOT complaint route. It took another 2 months, and 2 more exchanges with the airline, but I finally got my refund. It was significant so I decided worth pursuing, but I'm quite certain I would not have gotten it otherwise. I am just sorry I didn't sooner - the hours of life lost on the phone, etc... were ridiculous.

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Tim Dunn Diamond

June 7, 2024, 7:35 am

It should be noted that the DOT is so far behind in compiling and releasing consumer complaint data that it is doubtful they are even processing complaints any more. They said back in 2023 that complaints soared in the post-covid domestic demand return period as a number of airlines had operational problems. Typically, the DOT released consumer complaint data in their monthly report two months after the end of the month for the data - which is the same cycle for on-time, cancellations, baggage handling and other data. ie. June 2024 operational data should be made public in the August 2024 report. In 2023, they started releasing the Air Travel Consumer Report w/o complaint data and even then it is often weeks behind schedule. The last consumer complaint data which the DOT published was in July 2023 for May 2023 and that was a revised report released months after the full July 2023 report. bottom line is that it is doubtful that is properly handling consumer complaints because they certainly are nearly a year behind schedule in releasing data to the public.

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