Budget airlines raise charges for buying tickets online.
[top photo: ONLINE LEVY - Like Tiger Airways and AirAsia, Jetstar Asia charges a fee for tickets booked online.]
BUDGET airlines call it a convenience fee.
But frequent travellers argue it’s an unfair fee.
AirAsia has since November been charging $5 for every one-way flight paid for online.
This fee is added on to the ticket price.
Late last year, budget airlines Tiger Airways and Jetstar Asia also increased their convenience fee from $5 to $6 for every one-way flight booked online.
Tiger had first introduced its convenience fee at $4 in 2007.
So, if you buy a pair of return tickets from either of these two airlines online, you have to fork out $24 in convenience fees instead of $20 previously.
For a pair of AirAsia return tickets, you have to pay $20 in convenience fees.
All three carriers said the fee goes into implementing and maintaining their online payment systems.
AirAsia Berhad’s regional head of commercial Kathleen Tan explained that there are multiple costs to maintaining online payment systems which are not just hardware related.
“These include software, communications, fraud detection and fraud prevention costs,” she said.
Frequent flyers are not happy.
Mr Kartik Agrawal, 30, a marketing executive, said he found out about the convenience fee when he bought return tickets from Singapore to Cambodia online from the AirAsia website last November .
He paid $260 for the tickets, which included the convenience fee of $10.
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