But what is the real price?

Most regular travellers will have experienced it. You get to the check-out stage of buying your plane ticket and all of a sudden the price you were initially quoted has been replaced by a much larger figure. Those “hidden necessary extras“, such as luggage charges and booking fees, have bumped the price high enough for you to reconsider your travel plans.

My pet hate is Sterling Airlines, who quite happily add a, although not strictly hidden, credit card payment charge per flight per person, meaning you’ll pay double the charge for a return flight even though it is one credit card transaction - quadruple for me as I usually book for two people.

The good news is that EU is trying to stop airlines and travel agencies from illegally hiding these charges and not displaying the real price on their websites. The bad news is that roughly only 50% of those found guilty seem to have taken notice.

The Consumer Protection Enforcement Network – CPC checked 386 websites selling airline tickets in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Spain or Sweden in a sweep exercise in September 2007.

79 of the 386 websites (20%) were found to have misleading indications of price and an additional 58 sites were in breach of other aspects of consumer law such as using pre-checked boxes for insurance.

According to the CPC, the focus of the sweep exercise was to obtain enforcement of consumer rights.

However, a mid-term report released yesterday by the CPC showed that of the 137 websites found wanting last year, only just over 50% had as of 22 February 2008 been corrected.

You can find a summary of enforcement results per country on the EU website.

I suppose some improvement is better than none, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person.

At any rate, even if the CPC had had a 100% success rate, it would not help me with my pet hate, as strictly speaking Sterling Airlines have not hidden the credit card payment charge. The charge is displayed in a separate “total” sidebar. But it is still unfair to charge per flight per person, when the true cost to the airline is per credit card transaction.

While I have little hope Sterling Airlines will change their ways, I suspect many of the airlines that practice such questionable business ethics may disappear with the rising fuel charges and hopefully be replaced by airlines with just and transparent charges.

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