Airlines charge extra for direct booking too

New Delhi: Aviation fuel may have got cheaper on Saturday, but flying has become much more expensive. India's three full service airlines— AI, Jet and Kingfisher — started levying a transaction surcharge on tickets sold by them. This surcharge is exactly similar to the fee that agents now charge — Rs 350 and Rs 500 for economy and business-class domestic flights and between Rs 1,200 to Rs 10,000 for international ones.
This means that there's no escaping this additional charge whether people buy tickets from agents who moved over to the new system after airlines stopped paying them any commission from Saturday, or directly from the carriers. A senior airline official claimed that this was done under pressure from travel agents. "Agents told us that if we sell tickets cheaper than them, agencies would find it hard to get business. So we had no option as 85% of all tickets are sold by agents and they have threatened to boycott the three biggest Indian airlines," the official said, clearly happy that airlines will pocket this entire amount.
Jet Airways CEO Wolfgang Prock-Schaeur said: "..As of now tickets sold on web don't have that additional fee and a final call on imposing it there is yet to be taken..." Kingfisher did not offer any comments on this move.
Now, both airlines and travel agencies will levy a transaction fee of Rs 350 to Rs 500 on domestic tickets sold by them. On international sector, the fee is much steeper at Rs 2,500 on economy; Rs 5,000 on business and Rs 10,000 on each first class ticket to all parts of the world, expect to southeast Asia and the Gulf. For these two regions, the fee is Rs 1,200 for economy, Rs 2,000 for business and Rs 5,000 for each first class ticket.
02/11/08 Saurabh Sinha & Himanshi Dhawan/Times of India

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Nov 2008