Air ticket booking and pricing gets more transparent with OFT enforcement

Airlines have long been accused of not making proper disclosures of the prices of air tickets to consumers at the time of starting the booking process. Often, there is a difference between the prices which are advertised and what the customer eventually has to pay at the end of the air ticket booking process. Besides, some charges are hidden, meaning that the exact heads in which these are broken are not disclosed to the passengers. The Office of Fair Trade (OFT) in UK has sought to put an end to one of these practices. It has issued an enforcement action to put an end to the practice of hiding the debit card surcharges until the payment is about to be made.

Twelve airlines have agreed to include the charges of debit card in the headline prices instead of mentioning these as surcharges at the end of air ticket booking. The charges for credit card can still be allowed to be charged as surcharge but these need to be mentioned at an early stage of the booking process. With more transparency in the pricing structure, passengers would be able to know how much are they being charged for and by mentioning these clearly in the marketing materials, advertisement and websites, the airlines would not be able to surprise them at the end of booking process.

This issue was a longstanding demand of consumer groups who wanted airlines to tell the actual price of ticket clearly in the initial stages of booking cheap flight tickets by including the card charges in the fare rather than charging these as surcharge close to the end. Even before the ruling was out, the airlines are including these charges in their front-end prices, be it their websites or marketing materials.