Biden seeks compensation for passengers for flight delays and cancellations

May 10, 2023

The Biden Administration announced on Monday, May 8, that it would seek to require airlines to compensate passengers for lengthy flight delays and cancellations that are within their control, reports The New York Times.

The Administration said it would start the process of establishing a new rule to require airlines to provide cash payments rather than merely refunds for significant travel disruptions. No major U.S. airline currently guarantees cash compensation for delays or cancellations, according to the Transportation Department.

“I know how frustrated many of you are with the service you get from your U.S. airlines,” President Biden said at the White House, where he appeared with Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, to announce the proposal.

“You deserve to be fully compensated,” Mr. Biden added. “Your time matters. The impact on your life matters.”

The Administration did not provide specifics about the proposal, such as how much airlines would be required to pay travelers. Biden said his Administration would propose the rule “later this year.” The federal rule-making process can be lengthy, so the proposal is not likely to take effect any time soon.

The airline industry has come under intense scrutiny after a string of woes, including a series of flight disruptions last year as air travel rebounded after plunging because of the coronavirus pandemic. In December, a winter storm led to an operational meltdown at Southwest Airlines, stranding passengers during the holiday travel season.

The new proposal adds to Buttigieg’s efforts to push the airline industry to improve the customer experience. During his tenure, the Transportation Department has imposed millions of dollars in fines on airlines for a number of violations—including for issues related to customer refunds, although some critics have pushed for him to take a harder line with the industry.

In September, the department rolled out an online dashboard showing travelers what services they are entitled to when a flight is significantly delayed or canceled for reasons within the airline’s control. Buttigieg has credited the creation of the dashboard with pushing airlines to improve their policies.

On Monday, the department announced it had expanded the dashboard—which can now be found at FlightRights.gov—to include information about what compensation, if any, airlines have committed to offering passengers for delays and cancellations.

The department also has pushed airlines to guarantee that young children can sit with an accompanying adult at no extra charge. In March, it unveiled a similar dashboard showing which airlines had done so.

The proposal to require airlines to provide compensation to passengers is the latest in a string of consumer-oriented steps announced by the Biden Administration. In his State of the Union Address in February, the president highlighted his Administration’s efforts to reduce “junk fees,” and he took aim at airlines for charging families to sit together.

The new proposal resembles a policy that is already in place in the European Union, where passengers can receive up to 600 euros, or about $660, for delayed or canceled flights.

In addition to requiring compensation for passengers, the proposal would also mandate that airlines cover expenses like meals and hotel accommodations that are incurred because of delays or cancellations within the airlines’ control. Many airlines already cover such expenses.

“When an airline causes a flight cancellation or delay, passengers should not foot the bill,” Buttigieg said in a statement.

At the White House on Monday, Buttigieg said there had been “unacceptable” rates of delayed and canceled flights last summer, but he said things were looking up.

“Each month so far this year, preliminary data show cancellation rates under 2 percent, even during that busy spring break season,” he said. “But summer travel is going to put enormous pressure on the system, and we need to continue our work.”

Research contact: @nytimes

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany