I further feel, quite strongly, that airlines should not be allowed to advertise a base fare at all. I live abroad, and some of the regional airlines (which don’t service North America or any U.S. destination so are, I suppose, beyond U.S. jurisdiction) run ridiculous ads saying “Fly to X for just [some ludicrously low fare equal to as little as the equivalent of US$10-12]. Some US carriers aren’t much better. A ticket advertised for, let’s say, “Just $29!” ought to come in somewhere in that range — not, say, a total of $250 after all the other fees, surcharges, taxes, and any other charges either the government or the airline itself adds.

As for the prominent notice bit — I’ve NEVER seen ANY notice of extra charges I would consider remotely anything “prominent.” Unless tiny, pale gray type scrunched at the very bottom of the page, a page splashed with bright colors, lots of info, and large type counts as “prominent,” that is. Having taught university courses that include visual layout of pages, I can say with something to back me up — that ain’t prominent.

This stuff really irks me. . . .

I am not generally a fan of massive government regulation, but history has shown that communicating clear prices is something companies won’t do on their own, and appropriate consumer protection seems like a requirement here. What irritates me is why arlines lobby so strongly against this. Don’t they realize that the rules would apply equally to all their competitors, and they will still be able to compete on price in the same way they do now?

This whole issue of undisclosed taxes/fees has been a thorn in the side of my trip planning for years. It makes airfare shopping take forever. You often have to enter info into several screens before you can get to the *actual* full cost of the ticket. And then, if you don’t buy it right then, but go to check out other sites (and click down through THEIR screens to get a real price), the other one changes. I will often line up 10 open browsers and get each site to the final fare so I can do a price comparison. But this takes FOREVER.

Glad that the DOT is doing something. But this is less than a slap on the wrist, and I don’t see that teensy fines like these will make much of a difference. How about a consequence with some actual teeth?

But of course those poor software engineers who actually implemented the “inadvertent programming error” got blamed and now have the weight of $40,000 on their shoulders. Nice.

* Each way based on one way travel. Taxes and fees not included.

That means your $499 (quite a deal!) trip to Singapore is actually more like $1350.

The fact that some web sites have more prominent asterisks than others is neither here nor there – the whole practice is ridiculous.

A $4 million dollar fine would have gotten the airline’s attention in a meaningful way. Having to pay $40,000 might embarrass it, but is no deterrent to allowing ” inadvertent programming errors” of this nature to occur in the future.