Category Archives: Fares

Award seat availability dropped 5.4% in 2017 compared to 2016 according to Cartrawler's annual Reward Seat Availability Survey. Leisure travelers buying cheap tickets may be members of a frequent flyer program to collect miles. After all, while taxiing a flight attendant tells them over the intercom that the miles can be spent on "free tickets" and other things. But free tickets do not exist. It is airline speak for award tickets that require payment both in cash and in miles. Leisure travelers flying on cheap tickets do not collect enough miles...

Airlines can no longer charge their sky high credit card fees in the UK according to new rules the UK government published on July 19, 2017. This will save UK consumers £473 million (€529 million or $621 million) each year according to the economic secretary to the treasury, Stephen Barclay, who calls credit card fees "rip-off charges." Interestingly, the UK government will also have to stop ripping off its own citizens. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, for example, adds a flat fee of £2.50 (€2.79 or $3.28) to vehicle tax...

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) intends to require airlines to provide a full ticket refund without charging a cancelation fee if a passenger chooses to cancel the flight 90 days or more before departure. The new policy would not cover administrative costs incurred by the carrier when the flight was booked. But it would exempt some deeply discounted tickets. The costs of flight bookings are extremely low as airlines transformed the booking process already long ago into a do-it-yourself event. Even so, most carriers continued to charge a reservation or booking...

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ordered airlines on July 6, 2017 to increase transparency of their airfares by individually disclosing taxes, airport fees and other charges levied to consumers. Moreover, the CJEU ruled that carriers can no longer levy extra charges against customers who either miss or cancel their flights. Airlines hate transparency because they know that they will sell more tickets if consumers are ill-informed about the total price of a flight. As a result of this ruling, however, carriers can no longer hide additional charges to the...

Several readers asked us about seat selection on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. They found out they had to pay for advance seat selection and wonder what that has to do with the airline's cost. The short answer is: nothing. Advance seat selection does not impose any cost on carriers. They only charge advance seat selection fees because they can. Traditional network airlines like KLM face competition from low-cost carriers like EasyJet, Norwegian and Ryanair that are similar to Frontier Airlines and

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