CTA Says Finding Bag Fees Alone Is A Byzantine Maze
The Consumer Travel Alliance (CTA), a non-profit organization
promoting consumer interests on travel policy issues, released an
analysis Monday it says shows that major U.S. airlines are not
disclosing the vast majority of existing ancillary fees on their
websites, despite regular statements to the contrary by the
airlines. CTA and other leading consumer and travel organizations
are meeting with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today to
support his efforts to bring full transparency to airline fees.
The CTA analysis tracked the time and effort it would take a
typical two-bag traveler needing extra legroom to find and
calculate the total cost of a flight from Washington, D.C. to
Orlando, Florida.
CTA says the analysis found:
- Not one of the seven airline websites in the study offered a
page or chart with specific fee information regarding extra legroom
or seat upgrades.
- Although the airline sites disclosed baggage fees, those fees
were often multiple clicks away from the main page and buried in
diagrams and legal fine print.
- To compare baggage fees and attempt to find the fees for extra
legroom, a typical traveler would have to visit seven different
airline sites, view 47 different web pages, and dig through more
than 11,000 words of airline fine print.
The analysis examined a single traveler with two checked bags
wishing to obtain extra legroom on a flight from Washington, D.C.
to Orlando, Florida. Base prices for the analysis were drawn from a
popular online travel site. The analysis recorded the time and
steps required to enter those fees manually, visit each of the
websites of the seven airlines flying that route, attempt to locate
the fees for checked baggage and extra legroom, and then calculate
the full price of each itinerary.
"The airlines are asking travelers to put on a blindfold and
hand over their wallets every time they buy a ticket," said Charles
Leocha, director of the Consumer Travel Alliance. "There is no way
for a traveler to find the vast majority of extra fees charged by
airlines on their websites, because those fees aren't even listed.
That's why two-thirds of air travelers said in a recent survey that
they had been surprised by hidden fees at the airport. If airlines
want to charge ancillary fees, they should be required to disclose
those fees through every distribution channel in which they sell
their tickets."
The analysis also refuted frequent airline claims that all of
their ancillary fees are listed on their websites. For example, a
spokesperson for the airline industry told Bloomberg on September
17th that "fee information is already available on carrier Web
sites." In another news story, the same spokesperson said that
"airlines post their fees on their websites ..." and went on to
claim that "there's nothing hidden about the fees by the US
airliners that have fees."
Earlier this year, CTA released the results of a study showing
that hidden fees charged by airlines on popular routes can increase
the base cost of an airline ticket by an average of 54 percent for
a typical traveler with two checked bags and extra legroom, or by
an average of 26 percent for a comparable one-bag traveler. One of
the routes examined in that earlier analysis was used as the basis
for this current review.
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