Delta Dumps Fee for Tickets Not Booked on Net

Delta Air Lines on Tuesday abandoned its controversial experiment to coax travelers into buying tickets on its Web site, dropping the $2 fee imposed on all domestic reservations not made on the Internet.

Peggy Estes, spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based carrier, said the company was dropping the fee because Delta determined that even at $2, the surcharge made Delta’s fares too high to compete with its rivals. None of the other major domestic carriers such as United Airlines and Northwest Airlines matched the fee, which Delta instituted Jan. 11.

“We were higher than other carriers, and we have to be competitive,” Estes said. “The market spoke, and we responded.”

When it was implemented, consumer advocates loudly decried the fee as unfair, robbing travelers of booking options and serving as a “regressive tax” on customers without access to computers.

Terry Trippler, editor of the consumer magazine Airfare Report, said backlash from the surcharge would have been hard to ignore.

“This was just a public relations disaster for Delta,” Trippler said. “They were getting hammered in the press and hammered in the industry. The surcharge looked tacky, and it was tacky. Someone at Delta just got it backwards. If they wanted customers to book on the Internet, they should have offered a $2 discount.”

Delta, Estes said, originally envisioned the surcharge as a means of cutting down ticket distribution costs such as travel agent commissions and salaries for the airline’s own sales force.

Estes said the outcry had little to do with the carrier’s decision. She would not comment when asked whether Delta, the nation’s third-largest airline, had seen a drop in bookings during the 14 days the surcharge was in place.

The American Assn. of Travel Agents, one of the most ardent critics of the fee, welcomed the turnaround.

“We thought they shot themselves in the foot [with the surcharge],” said Steve Loucks, spokesman for the travel agent advocacy group based in Washington. “Their attitude about it was so cavalier. They really didn’t think this one through all the way.”

Loucks added, however, that the fee would probably still be in place if other U.S. carriers had decided to match it.

Travel agent Ada Brown, owner of Seaside Travel in Long Beach, agrees. “I think if the other airlines had gone along with it, it would have sailed right on through,” she said.

Brown called the surcharge just another “aggressive” move on the part of Delta and other major airlines to squeeze travel agents and their commissions out of the ticket sales loop. Delta was the first U.S. airline to restrict the amount of commission travel agents can make from ticket sales, and other airlines quickly followed its lead.

Brown, however, doesn’t think Delta’s decision to drop the fee will stop the carrier and the airline industry overall from imposing a similar fee in the future.

Trippler, however, thinks consumer outcry, like the uproar that met the Delta surcharge, may keep any future fees short-lived.

“I’m going to chalk this one up as a win for the consumer,” he said. “The public came out against this from the moment it was implemented. Otherwise, it probably would have been $2 today and $10 tomorrow,” he said.