Another worthless passenger bill of rights heads to the runway

You’re probably right about the motivation for “consumer advocates” to approve of this terrible legislation. In addition, I see that the advisory committee members will get travel and per diem expenses on the taxpayer’s dime. And if the bill passes, no matter how weak, these advocates will get lots of great publicity and the public will think they’re wonderful because they (the public) won’t look at the fine print. Ultimately, free travel, publicity, notoriety and titles must be what this is really all about. It obviously isn’t about passenger’s rights or genuine consumer advocates wouldn’t support it. Who are these advocates anyway?

Regarding JimT’s comment post about free travel and publicity.

Forgive me…what planet do you live on? Have you ever been to DC to lobby, advocate or otherwise work with elected officials and government bureaucrats to accomplish real change? It ain’t no celebrity picnic.

Free travel and publicity for private Joe Schmoe citizens who spend THOUSANDS of personal dollars and uncounted hours away from family and productive work to roam halls in Washington DC trying to knock common sense into Reps and Senators?

(Heavy sarcasm to follow.) Yeah, that’s what the advocates are after…free travel and publicity. You caught them…dipping into the free travel and publicity wellspring. The DOT is a bastion of free travel and publicity debauchery.

Rethink your comments. They make NO SENSE are not founded in any reality or facts about Washington DC I have ever witnessed.

Alan Fiermonte
Big Time Free Traveler and Celebrity Citizen Lobbyist Thanks to the Largess of the DOT

Why did only two people respond to the above author’s criticism of the new law. Where are all the rest of these angry members?

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock or something, but I had never heard of this Kate Hanni person. I’m a frequent flyer so I thought I’d look into this “coalition” and the other things she mentioned in her comments – i.e. her blogspot, website. I Googled “Kate Hanni” and got thousands of hits. Wow! Looks like she’s quoted quite often, and lots of accomplishments, though some of their claims are questionable. I’ll get to that later. I was mostly interested in maybe joining, but I wanted to know what it was I would be joining. There are so many scams out there these days. There are hundreds of articles on the web that say this coalition has increasing numbers of members – 23,000 now I guess. I looked into this further and found some curious things – I’m naturally skeptical, so bear that in mind;

1. Hanni mentioned a blogspot, so I managed to find it and that – In the last six months, except for posts by Kate Hanni, there are maybe eight or nine other posts from other people – and some of those are in opposition to what she’s advocating. All in all, seems pretty dormant for a main blog on the subject. Hardly any activity for the last year in fact. You would think for a group of that size, there would be thousands of postings.

2. She also mentioned her website where I found another message board/forum that says it has over 5000 members, but if you look at the memberlist, 99% of them are spammers (prescription drugs, porn, etc). It says there are 176 posts, but the last post was three months ago. And just browsing through the posts, it looks like there are only about 15 real people that have ever posted. Not much activity at all really.

3. There’s a YouTube video of Hanni that is apparently a recap of one of her trips to DC from a couple of months ago, but it only has 120 views. You can get 120 views on Youtube by accident! Shouldn’t that video have 23,000 views? Don’t the members care? And in that video she says there were seven people on the most recent trip to DC. When I read her post above, I thought she meant scores of people. And then she has a music video up there where she describes herself as the “founder of the coalition … Hot hot hot.” What’s that all about? She’s not looking for attention or publicity though, she says.

So then I went back to the website and read the newsletters they have posted on there. Interesting stuff:

1. They made several impassioned pleas last year for their members to send comments to the US DOT about some airline regulations. After a fair amount of trouble, I found those comments on a DOT website and I started looking at a few of them. At first I thought wow, these guys are on the ball. Very thorough comments. But then I noticed was that the comments were all the same. Not a big deal I guess – they all have the same message – OK. But then I noticed (at the top of the pages) that a couple of them were faxed from the same fax number. So I randomly looked at about fifty of them – and they all come from the same fax number and name, even though in the list they look like they came from separate people. How is that possible? That’s kind of strange don’t you think? It’s like one person actually faxed in all those comments making it look like there were other people faxing comments. Why didn’t anyone at the DOT notice that? And why are there only approximately 170 comments submitted from non-airline or other people. Where are the other 23,000 people’s comments? Then in their newsletters, they claim these responses from their members are what got these regulations passed. Can that be true?!?!

2. The other funny thing about these newsletters, if you read them in chronological order, is that they’re constantly asking for volunteers for some hotline, airport coordinators, donations and all kinds of other things. And it’s evident that they aren’t getting any help because the same pleas are repeated time after time – for months. And then in some newsletters they complain that nobody showed up at hearings and other events that they promoted heavily in previous newsletters. And there are other curious things too. You just have to read them to see what I mean. It just seems like there’s really no membership, just people pretending that there’s a membership and not doing a very good job at it.

It’s like 1984 in reverse, where there’s a small group of people manipulating the government with bogus newsletters and media campaigns instead of the other way around!

3. Then I went to the “free membership” link from their website which takes you to a third-party petition website. They have 23,172 signatures on this thing. But If you look at it, it doesn’t say anything about joining anything. It’s a petition for a Congressman Mike Thompson to support a passengers bill of rights. So what if people got to that petition from a Google search just because they were upset with some airline? How does that petition translate into joining this group? Maybe there’s some other link that use to join, but I can’t find it.

So I created a phony signature and hit the Sign Petition button. It still didn’t say anything about joining anything. But now I guess they have 23,173 members.

And the petition doesn’t say anything about supporting this new questionable law that was just introduced either!!! Anybody confused? I am. Are these people using this petition, created for one thing, and the people that signed it, as the basis for their support? Is there any publicly available evidence at all that this coalition really exists beyond Hanni and the handful of people identified in their newsletters and on their website? The whole thing looks like an elaborate snow job to this observer.

4. Then I looked briefly at some of their accomplishments. There were a few recent articles where they take credit for getting a New York law passed, but curiously there’s no mention in any of their newsletters about a New York law until December when they write about a court challenge to the already enacted law. Seems odd. And while there are lots of articles about the group working at the federal level and in California about state laws, there don’t seem to be any articles available about them working on the New York law until they got involved in defending the existing law, but lost. OK, give them points for trying, but state laws regulating the airlines seems illogical so probably a waste of time anyway.

There’s quite a lot in the media and in their newsletters about getting airline statistics improvements enacted. That seems like a relatively benign thing, but I only saw one DOT submission from their group on that subject. Again, where’s the 23,000? I feel like saying, “Where’s the beef?”

Then there’s the bumping compensation increases enacted by the DOT recently – a subject I know something about having been bumped several times myself. They take credit for that too, when in fact those regulations were proposed by the airlines themselves years ago, and then enacted by the administration at the urging of Congress. What did this group have to do with any of that? There was nothing in their newsletters until after the changes were announced, but they give themselves credit in their most recent newsletter about all the calls and faxes their members made. There are 55 total DOT submissions for the overbooking rules, but I could only find one that was from the coalition.

I only spent a few hours looking at this. It was an interesting diversion from my normal activities, but imagine if someone spent a couple of days. Something funny going on here. Somebody might want to think about scrutinizing these people if they have as much influence as they say they have. Who are they and what motivates them? They say it isn’t fame and fortune, so what is it? If these guys are legit, great – good for them. But there’s a lot of questionable tactics and ethics going on – even at a glance.

And one final thought … if they have all these supportive members presumably donating money, etc, then why do they have to use their own money (their words) for expenses? I saw an article somewhere where Hanni took out a second mortgage to pay for expenses. Something just doesn’t ring true here. It just doesn’t add up.

Kate Hanni has never once been able to let anyone know how and where she spends the money her group gets. I have repeatedly heard from various people who have helped her (mind you no one stays with her for any length of time) of the expensive spa treatments, the drinks and bar tabs, the work Kate has gotten done to her face, the hair extensions and all that Hanni does to get the publicity for herself (see the website and you will know what I am talking about). Its one big PR for Hanni and Hanni alone.No one else is ever acknowledged…dosen’t the media get it??