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.
