At A Time of Rising Travel Costs, Proposed Rollback Would Make Airline Prices Harder to Compare and Easier to Obscure
LOS ANGELES — August 25, 2026 — This past Friday, Consumer Watchdog joined consumer protection and legal aid organizations in urging the U.S. Department of Transportation to withdraw a proposed rule that would weaken longstanding requirements that airlines prominently advertise the full price consumers will actually pay for a ticket.
The coalition’s comments, led by the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice at UC Berkeley Law, also ask the Department to hold a public hearing before moving forward.
Read the coalition’s comments here.
The proposal comes as consumers are already confronting sharply higher transportation and household costs. The coalition notes that airfares have risen substantially on many heavily traveled routes, while U.S. airlines earned $6 billion in profits in 2025. Against that backdrop, the groups argue, it is difficult to understand why DOT would choose this moment to make airline prices less transparent and potentially weaken price competition.
For nearly fifteen years, DOT’s Full Fare Rule has required airlines to display the total fare more prominently than taxes, fees, or other component charges. The Department now proposes allowing individual charges to be displayed just as prominently as the total price, while also revoking nine consumer-protection guidance documents developed across both Democratic and Republican administrations dating back to 1994.
“This is deregulation in service of making prices harder to understand,” said Ryan Mellino of Consumer Watchdog. “At a time when families are already feeling squeezed, it is hard to see how inviting airlines to obscure the real price of a ticket — and weakening the pressure to compete on that price — passes the smell test. Competition works when consumers can see the price, compare the price, and choose the better deal. DOT’s plan is flatly anticompetitive.”
The coalition warns that the proposal would undermine apples-to-apples price comparison and weaken the very market competition DOT is required by law to promote. The filing notes that the four largest airlines already control roughly 75 percent of the domestic market, making clear that price competition is particularly important given the limited options.
The proposal would also discard guidance that currently bars a range of deceptive practices, including advertising supposedly “free” tickets while hiding mandatory charges, disguising carrier-imposed fees as taxes, failing to disclose higher telephone-booking prices, and advertising discounts that are not genuinely available.
Consumer advocates argue DOT has offered no meaningful evidence that the existing rules are harming consumers or competition. The Department conducted no cost-benefit analysis of the proposed rollback, did not meaningfully examine alternatives, and failed to address how the changes could affect seniors, people with visual or processing disabilities, consumers using screen readers, and others who already face barriers navigating online pricing.
Even Southwest Airlines, which opposed the original rule in 2011, now supports keeping it and has warned that consumers have developed settled expectations that the first price they see includes government taxes and fees.
“The answer to an affordability crisis is more price competition, not more ways to obscure the price,” Mellino said. “Airlines are already free to tell passengers how much of a ticket is taxes or fees. What they should not be free to do is make the real bottom-line price harder to find.”
The coalition urges DOT to withdraw the proposal, preserve the Full Fare Rule and existing consumer-protection guidance, and undertake any future rulemaking with meaningful analysis of its impact on consumers, competition, and affordability.
