This Week in Flight Fee News: American Airlines to Provide ‘Early Boarding’ Service
Travel News — By Ben Van Loon on June 18, 2010 at 5:15 amYou might remember the days where you got free refreshments or complimentary headphones for your flights, or even the booming age of free bag checking. But now the industry is inundated with ridiculous ‘handling charges’ and ‘storage fees’ and ‘upgrades,’ and everything else that used to be taken for granted. Smartertravel has a helpful .pdf here detailing a comparison of different airline’s baggage and other associated fees.
More recently, walletpop.com ran a story about American Airline’s new attempt to gouge passengers thinly lined wallets. It’s an ‘Early Boarding Fee.’ You don’t want to wait for Group 4 to be called? For a small price of anywhere between $9 and $19, relative to the trip, you can board when they call Group 1. Your seat number doesn’t change, of course, and you’ll still be one of the last ones off the plane, but at least you can spend extra money on your trip to hurry up and get nowhere.
Attempting to wax positive about the fee, American Airlines calls the program ‘Your Choice’. It’s part of their ‘Boarding and Flexibility Package,’ which is as arbitrary as it sounds. The problem is absurd: The ‘Your Choice’ idea is an indirect admission that the company is aware of passenger’s irritation at slug-paced boarding procedures, due especially to oversized carry-ons and so forth. Rather than addressing the problem, of which they are well-aware, they exploit it, and thus you new things like ‘Boarding and Flexibility Packages.’
Meanwhile, some of the major airlines, including American had reported revenues in the billions for the 2009 term. Like all things free market, the fees will inevitably remain, even if/when the economy begins its expected upturn.
[Image: cnn.com]
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