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People like to fly during the holidays - and the airlines want to exploit that
The airfare specialists over at Farecompare.com came across something rather unsettling a couple of days ago. When looking at the fares airlines loaded into the various booking systems, they noticed that American Airlines started adding a $10 fee applied to all flights on the Sunday after Thanksgiving (Nov. 29) and Jan. 2 and 3. Shortly after that, United Airlines pulled the same stunt, followed by Delta Airlines. Essentially, this "Miscellaneous surcharge" is a way for the airlines to make a huge amount of money on the days people need them the most.
It may not be as pathetic as the new British Airways seat selection fee we wrote about, but it comes pretty damn close.
These holiday tickets are historically the most expensive of the season, but making all that extra cash isn't enough for the airlines. The only way to stay away from this bogus surcharge is to avoid the three days mentioned above, or to pick an airline that has not (yet) chosen to climb on board the silly surcharge bandwagon.
Filed under: Airlines
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
lucy Sep 27th 2009 1:35PM
What do you people have against the airlines making a little profit??? It's only frigging $10.00. If you want to save a buck, shop at Wal Mart! As far as I'm concerned, give those airplanes the best of everything and hire the best pilots and mechanics that money can buy. I'll be glad to pay $10.00 extra dollars to get me there in one piece.
Scott Carmichael Sep 27th 2009 9:22PM
If an airline is unable to make ends meet with its core product (selling tickets), then they need to take a close hard look at how they run their business.
I could deal with paying for food, I can understand them selling some premium upgrades like pre-boarding, but a completely pointless and unjustified fee is just greed. This isn't a fuel surcharge, or any other fee to offset something special, it's just $10 they know they can make without too much of a hassle.
Like verdegrrl says - other airlines like Southwest can survive just fine without all these fees. If they can do it, and the legacy carriers can not, then those carriers are broken, and need to be fixed. And fixing things does not mean charging their passengers enough in useless fees to make a profit.
It is very noble to think that the $10 goes towards making sure you get to your destination in one piece, but that implies that without the $10, they would be flying an unsafe plane.
verdegrrl Sep 27th 2009 9:17PM
Lucy, I think the point is that they are sneaking in pointless fees over and above the quoted fare and legitimate charges. At what point do we see fares shown for $10, but with $200 surcharges, just so the airline can look like they have the lowest rates? It's the sneaky nature of the thing that makes us dislike it.
This way they can claim fares have never been so low, blah, blah, blah, but when you add up all the baggage fees, this and that fee, and now this "just because" fee, I'm not so sure they are as cheap as they claim.
Just look at Southwest and Virgin who don't appear to need government bailouts, have satisfied customers, and and are more straightforward in their customer billing than many other airlines.