Will Airlines Push Travel Sites to Pay Credit-Card Fees?
The razor-thin profits the online travel agencies get on airline bookings could get even thinner.
As reported last week by the travel research firm PhocusWright, United Airlines is forcing some travel agencies to absorb the 2 percent-3 percent credit-card fees for ticket bookings. The PhocusWright blog post asserts that if this approach were widely adopted by airlines and applied to the online travel agencies, “they would be forced to reinstate some sort of booking fee in order to cover the costs of paying credit-card merchant fees.” And that could give a pricing advantage to the airlines’ own Web sites.
