Three airlines hike fees

AN INCREASE in the price of airfares from April 1 has been announced by three of the major air carriers operating in Bulgaria, British Airways (BA), Lufthansa and Alitalia.
The three companies’ trade offices in Bulgaria will start charging a service fee of between 20 euro and 60 euro for issuing air tickets. The fee will be added to the price of the ticket itself, when the ticket is bought at the offices of the companies or through their websites.

Travel agents will be free to decide whether they will charge a fee and what size the fee will be, representatives of the three carriers told a news conference in Sofia on March 17.
The fee charged by BA will be 20 euro, and the charge will be uniform for European and intercontinental flights. It will apply only to sales of paper tickets, given that the company considers website purchases as self-service, BA country sales manager Emil Delibashev said. “We are just following the model that was introduced in the US and has already been applied all over the world,” Delibashev said.
BA’s reasons for charging the fee are that the company has been seriously hit by the recession in the flight industry after September 11, and a number of other political and conflict situations globally. They are also facing constantly increasing competition from low-fare carriers, and rising fuel prices, according to Delibashev.
For flights to Europe and North Africa, Alitalia will charge 25 euro for an e-ticket and 35 euro for a paper one, and for intercontinental flights, 35 euro and 45 euro respectively. The reasons for the introduction of the fees arise from Alitalia’s development programme for the period 2005-2007, said the airline’s general manager for Bulgaria, Marcelo Valle. The programme’s main direction is towards cutting distribution costs, which include the sales of tickets.

Lufthansa’s fee will be 25 euro for Europe and 50 euro for flights to destinations further away. A further 10 euro will be charged by the German carrier if a customer buys a paper ticket from it, said Dieter Grosse, Lufthansa’s manager for Bulgaria and Macedonia. He also cited the pressure that the flight industry had been experiencing in the past few years as the reason for charging the fee.
Alitalia and Lufthansa are cutting the commissions granted to travel agents for selling their tickets from the current seven to just one per cent. BA would not say what their decrease would be, but Delibashev said the cut was in the company’s plans. Travel agents will be free to charge whatever size service fee they want in regard to the number of services they offer to each customer, all three of the managers said.

Source: http://www.sofiaecho.com/