Airlines' Goodwill Gestures towards Active Duty Personnel

Several airlines are waiving the third bag checked fee which was being levied on active duty service personnel. This is clearly a sincere attempt by the major airlines to curtail the negative PR generated by recent news articles. Continental and Northwest, Airtran, United both announced fee waivers on Friday. While this is a generous gesture, (as a potential shareholder in airlines I feel) essentially this amounts to a subsidy to the DOD (Department of Defense of the taxpayers of United States of America). So one important thing that airlines and their individual retail shareholders could do is to write to the DOD to make sure that the DOD reimburse the airlines in some form. One solution would be for airlines to collect vouchers from the soldiers and then forward the same to DOD, which could them reimburse them on a quarterly basis.