Consumer Travel Alliance report finds major U.S. airlines not disclosing most fees on websites

A typical passenger traveling from Washington, D.C. to Orlando must check seven airline websites, visit 47 web pages and scan 11,000 words to find baggage fees alone, states a new report issued by The Consumer Travel Alliance, a non-profit organization promoting consumer interests on travel policy issues.

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. The analysis not a single 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.

“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.

Travelers concerned about the issue of hidden fees can visit MadAsHell, a joint effort of the Consumer Travel Alliance, Business Travel Coalition, and American Society of Travel Agents, to sign a petition urging the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to take action to make those fees fully transparent.

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.

[Image via Flickr user Fly For Fun]