Friday, December 23, 2011

Stop ripping us off

Pam and I regularly book flights to the UK using budget airlines and have got used to the “extra charges” we have to pay. The charge that irritates us most is the one levied for using a card to pay. How on earth can they justify charging to use a card when that is the only means of payment?

It isn’t just low cost airlines that charge to use a card, the practice has become widespread on the Internet.  Annoyingly, it is only when you are about to click on the final button on the screen that the amount you will be charged to use a card pops up. In some cases, the charge is more than the item you are buying which is a nonsense.

These days it costs buttons to process debit card payments and not a lot more to process credit cards so why do the likes of Ryanair charge £12 and why do some ticket vendors charge a fee per ticket when they only pay a fee per transaction?

The answer is simple, they are ripping us off but no more because the UK Government have decided to stop the practice by imposing a ban. You can bet that low cost airlines will be smarting at that idea because charging for the “extras” is how they make huge profits. It would not surprise me to find that they shift the levy to some other item of “extras” that you can’t avoid.

1 comment:

Charles Smythe said...

No... raised prices for 'extras' will not be incurred... However, because of the British government's involvement it will be flight prices themselves which will be raised.

RyanAir and other cheap airlines cannot lose, can they?