Consumers’ fact-finding mission: Locate the total fare

BARGAIN hunting for an airfare on the Web? Pay close attention because that first price you see may not be what you end up paying.

Air travel shoppers on the Internet visit, on average, more than three websites before making a purchase, according to PhoCusWright, a Connecticut-based research firm. Yet websites differ greatly in how they display taxes and fees, which can make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult.

Some websites display the full and final price, including all taxes and fees, on the first search-results page. Others display only the “base fare” on that page. Depending on the destination, a base fare can be more than $100 lower than the final fare a consumer has to pay. On these sites, it is not until well into the booking process that the total price is revealed.

I searched for an airfare between LAX and London for mid-October on American Airlines’ (www.aa.com) and United Airlines’ (www.united.com) websites. At American, I found a $428 fare. At United, the fare was $650 for the same dates, an apparent savings of more than $200. (These fares may no longer be available.)

But a few clicks later, the price of the fare at American jumped $110 to $538 when all the taxes and fees were figured in. Still a significant savings over the United fare in this instance (which included all taxes and fees in the first number quoted and therefore did not increase) but not as great as at first glance.

The U.S. Department of Transportation regulates how airlines and travel agencies advertise fares in print and online.

“The [advertised] fare must be the full fare with the exception of those government-imposed fees calculated on a per-passenger basis,” said department spokesman Bill Mosley. “It’s the same for Internet ads.”

The “base fare” includes the actual price of the ticket as charged by the airline plus a 7.5% federal tax. Because percentages are more difficult for passengers to calculate, any taxes that are a percentage of the fare must be included in the base fare, Mosley said.

Per-passenger taxes that can be excluded from the base fare include airport-imposed taxes (also known as airport passenger facility charges), 9/11 security taxes of up to $10 per round-trip ticket and a government excise tax of $3.20 on each flight segment.

“We do get taxed a lot as an industry,” said American Airlines spokesman Billy Sanez.

Supposedly, the idea of breaking out the per-passenger fees is to make it easier for passengers to calculate their total flight cost by simple addition, Mosley said. But as more and more fees get tacked onto airfares, it becomes that much more difficult to know just what your final cost will be.

“Our research has shown that [consumers] would rather have all fares and taxes shown in the base fare,” says Henry Harteveldt, a vice president and analyst at Forrester Research, an online travel research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

American Airlines’ website at one time displayed the full fare at first glance. But last November it changed its policy and now displays only the base fare until much farther into the booking process.

“American has to be responsive to the marketplace,” said Harteveldt. That marketplace includes low-cost airlines such as Southwest and JetBlue, which advertise their base fares and add taxes and fees later in the booking process.

To be fair, the total fare is displayed to consumers before purchase on all airline and travel-agency sites. It’s just that getting to that total fare now requires more work on some. It’s an area where the big online travel agencies seem to offer an advantage to consumers.

“The agencies translate everything into the same language,” Harteveldt said. “You see what your real true ticket price is going to be.”

Each of the big three -- Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity -- displays the total fare in the first search-results page. But just in case this was too easy for consumers -- giving them what they want, according to the research -- Orbitz in July changed how it displays airfares, showing both the base fare and the total fare next to each other. Travelocity made a similar change in June but, just to keep consumers on their toes, only for its domestic fares. Expedia simply displays the total fare.

Of course, using an online agency for purchasing airfares adds another level of fee disclosure to the game because, unlike an airline’s site, agencies usually tack on a booking fee of their own to every ticket. Expedia does the best job of separating out this fee by disclosing it in the very next page in the booking process. Travelocity takes three pages, and Orbitz takes five.

“What travelers really must do is thorough research into the price of the ticket,” said Harteveldt. “Where one airline may appear to have a cheap price, it may not in reality be less expensive than one if its competitor’s.”

Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.

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How many clicks?

Airlines and travel booking sites don’t always immediately reveal online the full cost of a ticket. Here are select carriers and booking sites and the number of Web pages until you find the total price -- taxes and all:

Three: America West, American, Continental

Two: JetBlue, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic

One: Alaska, Northwest, United, U.S. Airways, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity

-- James Gilden