A lesson in how to get fleeced. Common example: If you want your airline ticket in paper you’ll have to pay $75 at United; $50 at American, Continental, Northwest and US Airways; $45 at Virgin Atlantic. [via Wheaties]
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A lesson in how to get fleeced. Common example: If you want your airline ticket in paper you’ll have to pay $75 at United; $50 at American, Continental, Northwest and US Airways; $45 at Virgin Atlantic. [via Wheaties]
Chris
on 29 Dec 06The NYTimes had an article a couple weeks ago about this—why we have so many hidden fees, when you would think that the free market would encourage moderating competition.
(Ironically, I had to google around to find a link to this article on their site that didn’t ask me to pay the $4.95 TimesSelect fee.)
Michael Doan
on 29 Dec 06What’s worse than this is having to pay more for something distributed electronically. For example, audio books from iTunes typically costs more and have less content (i.e., any charts, photos, graphs are omitted).
Jake
on 29 Dec 06@Michael … or Tickemaster electronic “convenience fees.”
But my question is, who in their right mind would want a paper ticket? Paper tickets are the devil. Seriously. There is nothing good whatsoever about paper tickets.
P. Arora
on 29 Dec 06Do you know that United has a $15 fees to book tickets over the phone?
Shane Shepherd
on 29 Dec 06In many scenarios the company has actually contracted a third party to handle these services for them. I don’t know any specifics relating to the airline industry, but transactions are often handled by a third party vendor who is charging the company a fee. the company then turns around and passes that fee, plus a certain percentage. These are often labeled “convenience fees”.
beto
on 29 Dec 06Paper airline tickets are still common fare on Latin America without extra charge (yet). You can blame it on the great technological gap still prevalent on this part of the world when compared to first world economies. I got myself a couple when reserving a vacation trip to a Colombian island two weeks ago. It’s kind of quaint. Self-service counters like those used on U.S. domestic flights are still an alien concept where I live. Heck, I still get my car filled up by a gas station attendant without price changes! (remember those?)
floyd
on 29 Dec 06I am not an economist, but this appears to me to be one of the many side effects of the economics of capitalism: imperfection of information. Almost all modern economic theory I’m aware of assumes ‘perfect’ distribution of information (and by extension, never a significant deviation in practice), but actually the situation is quite the opposite. Very few people are willing/able to educate themselves sufficiently before an economic exchange.
Lau
on 29 Dec 06Chris: The airline market in the US is heavily regulated. So this restricts the ability of the market to be efficient. For instance, last time I checked an airline with less than 50% American ownership is not allowed to fly domestic US flights. My guess is that this leaves out Virgin Atlantic airways for instance.
Some, if not all, of the other stuff on the list is also heavily regulated: insurance, banking. The regulation means higher cost for the companies and also makes it more difficult for newcomers to challenge the companies who are already in the market.
Regarding the NYT article: I’ve seen marketing campaigns in my home country for a bank and for at least two cell phone companies with the message that they had a more simple cost structure and had less (hidden) fees. Those cell phone companies are very successful and one of them came out of no where and took a very large share of the cell phone market, almost humiliating the older giants.
Lau
on 29 Dec 06floyd: Yeah, a lot of mainstream economics doesn’t make much sense. But the “Austrian” school of economics does not assume “perfect competition” or “perfectly symmetric information”. Here are some texts that talk about asymmetric information: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/know.html http://www.mises.org/story/1806
BS&S
on 30 Dec 06Yesterday I bought Hockey tickets online.
If I wanted to pick the tickets up at the gate the surcharge was $2.50. If I wanted to have them mailed to me, it was $2.50. If I wanted to print them off myself it was $2.00. Does that make any sense?
Dave
on 30 Dec 06Nice list, though somewhere around the middle I tried to figure out how many more list items were left…
On this page:
“35 most outrageous fees” “15 of 22” “23. Monthly service fee”
?
Neal
on 30 Dec 06I read the Money article and nowhere mentioned was this one.
I went to the US Post Office today to get a passport. When you pay for your passport, a check for $67 is written to the US State Department. Fine.
Here’s the kicker…and then you write a check to the Postal Service for $30 for a “transmittal fee”.
I suppose that’s for sending it to the State Department. Help me understand something here, isn’t that what the Post Office does? Send things?
Eric the Red
on 30 Dec 06Well, that is your basic discouragement fee. As in: Do not ask for a paper ticket. Who the hell wants a paper ticket anyway in this day and age? If I was the airline clerk handling your call for a paper ticket I would probably put you on the terrorist/drug suspect list just to teach you not to request freakin’ paper tickets.
But I’m a complete bastard that way.
Max
on 30 Dec 06Ryanair, like some other European low-cost carriers, charge you to check in luggage. I can buy their argument that handling checked luggage costs money and so it’s fairer to charge per item than to spread the cost amongst all passengers, many of whom are only carrying-on.
What bites me is that, if, when booking Ryanair tickets, you select “no luggage”, you’re then automatically charged a £4 fee for “priority boarding – hand luggage only”.
Demetrios Kyriakis
on 30 Dec 06BTW “outrageous fee” : it looks like MySQL AB is trying a similar thing by not releasing binaries for the latest MySQL versions: see here
D.
Esme Vos
on 30 Dec 06How about 15 EUR for downloading and uploading 1 MB? That’s what a European mobile operator will charge you if you go outside your home country and use GPRS to do email and web browsing. The data roaming rates are more outrageous than for voice. How to avoid this one: get a Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone and head for the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot.
andjules
on 31 Dec 06on a contrarian note: - Michael Doan: jake’s follow up is more to your point – there is nothing really convenient about ticketmaster’s charges, and they do not generally correlate to any real cost involved in ticketmaster’s service. An audio book, on the other hand, has to cover the intellectual/creative costs of the content, plus the recording and voice talent, plus the alternate marketing, etc… - Demetrios: not releasing source would be outrageous, but while withholding or charging for conveniently packaged binaries would be a drag were it to become more common, it isn’t really unethical. It is perhaps an elegant way to start to separate ”’free’ as in beer” from ”’free’ as in speech”. - in general: the important thing is distinguishing between extra or hidden charges where you have a choice vs ones where you don’t. Ticketmaster’s approach is unethical because they tend to add extra charges to the base service… they should really be the base service, because you can’t choose to not buy these “extra” services. For the paper airline tickets, you are at liberty to not purchase the extra service. United Airlines has the choice to try to make paper tickets a real profit-for center for themselves or not. Ironically, they’re not trying to make a lot of money here; the price is prohibitive – they’re saying they really don’t want paper tickets to be around in 3 years. If they were trying to make a lot of money (not just profit-per-transaction, but encourage volume as well), they’d be churning out marketing copy on the importance of having paper tickets, and would be charging $5-15 for paper tickets and pointing out how much their competitors charge. The “outrageous” charges are outrageous on purpose – you’re supposed to get the message and stop assuming that these inconvenient (for them) services should for some reason be part of their real services (flying you somewhere).
Adam
on 02 Jan 07I know it’s a little thing, but my friend and I snagged two free “30 minutes all you can play” tickets for GameWorks (Sega’s arcade extravaganza here in Seattle). They charged us $2 each for game cards. I don’t know, maybe I’m a little naive when I think free == free ;)
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
on 02 Jan 07The fee for paper tickets makes sense to me.
No, no, wait, hear me out.
Historically, each airline issued each travel agent a set of plates, which are used in an old-style “cha-ching” credit card machine. Those plates have to be kept in a vault when not in use.
Lost tickets were a constant hassle.
If you get paper tickets, not only do you have to keep possession of the paper, you also can’t use any of their boarding mechanisms to reduce lines and speed up the process. No early check-in, for example. Since you can’t go through security without a boarding pass any more, this also means that you must stand in line with the baggage handlers or the ticket counter, even if you have no checkable bags. So there’s not just the one cost of issuing the tickets, there’s multiple costs.
There are still small carriers, even in the US, who use only paper tickets. Cape Air comes to mind.
This discussion is closed.