Can Travelers Learn to Love Airline Fees?
Embrace annoying nuisance fees? Maybe, with the airlines' help.
June 24, 2010— -- The airline industry calls them ancillary revenues.
The traveling public calls them nuisance fees.
The industry depends on them.
Travelers loathe them.
Airlines argue it's a legitimate way to price their services.
Consumers grumble about pricing "surprises."
By whatever name, and to whatever end, airline fees have become a fact of travel life.
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Big Business, Nasty Business
In 2009 alone, airlines generated $7.8 billion from ancillary fees, largely from checked bags. That's a 42 percent increase over the previous year. And while that growth rate is unsustainable over the long term, no one expects the industry to throttle back on its newfound reliance on fee revenues.
As big and entrenched as the business of fees has become, the pushback from consumers, the media, legislators and consumer groups may be bigger still.
But that hasn't stopped the negative feedback.
In a report released last month, Consumer Reports found that the top two traveler gripes were both fee-related -- luggage charges and added airline ticket fees.
So incensed was he by Spirit's "outrageous" $45 fee for carry-on bags that New York Sen.Charles Schumer personally secured commitments from five of the largest U.S. airlines to foreswear such a fee, and vowed to petition 21 other carriers to do the same.
And the newly proposed DOT passenger protection rules take direct aim at the airlines' fees, mandating that advertised ticket prices reflect any and all surcharges, and that all charged fees be itemized.
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