No More Pretending To Have A Support Animal, American Airlines Makes Pet Travel Easier
Airline passengers for years have faced a choice when traveling with pets.
- Pay a pet in cabin fee for small dog or cat. And on top of the fee, the pet goes underneath the seat in front of you, but you aren’t allowed to bring a full-sized carry-on bag onto the plane.
- Or just pretend to have an emotional support animal. It’s free. You can still bring your carry-on bag. It can even be a horse.
Before the pandemic, the FAA worked with airlines on new regulations that helped them crack down on the Noah’s Ark approach to domestic pet travel. Ostensibly passengers are limited to real service animals now. In practice, though, you just have to fill out paperwork in advance and say you have a service animal.
That step alone cracks down on some of the abuse. People who were bringing turkeys onto planes aren’t also the people who tend to file paperwork in advance. However there’s still a disconnect.
Fortunately American Airlines has changed one policy that made it difficult to go legit, pay the fee, and keep fido or fifi in under the seat in front of them. American will no longer require you to forfeit your full-sized carry-on bag when flying with a pet in cabin.
- As of March 28, American Airlines no longer makes passengers give up their carry-on bag if they bring a pet in cabin.
- The old policy was they could bring a pet and a personal item only.
- Now they can bring a pet and either a carry-on or personal item.
American’s website has not yet been updated with this information as of this writing. However the new policy makes sense, as the theory at least was that you’d still only be bringing two items on board and not taking up more room in the overhead bin than a traveler without a pet – and that largely remains true. American also had larger overhead bins than when this old policy was put in place decades ago.