Gustavo
I agree that all taxes and fees should be indlcued in the quoted price from the carriers but credit and debit cards are a difficult issue for a travel agency. Now i'm in the US I'm no longer working for an ABTA or ATOL Agency (Just IATA/ARC and ASTA) I'm not familiar with the situation in the UK but we have to charge a fee for debit card transactions that we process. In most cases we don't charge the card ourselves. For example when airline tickets are issued through our CRS the airline charges the card. In that case there would be no extra charge unless the supplier made it (such as Ryanair does) If, for some reason we have to charge the clients card ourselves we are forced to pass on the fee that is charged by our merchant account. The simple reason for this is that our fee for airline tickets($25) in most cases doesn't cover the 3% merchant fee we have to pay. Since we don't have many of these transactions were not in a position to negotiate better fees. We could include the fee in the prices we quote, but then we would be ripping off' the clients who paid by cheque. Unlike Ryanair, our clients usually have the choice of how they pay and therefore the choice to pay the fee or not. I hate doing it, but i have no choice. The 3% fee we pay applies to both Debit Cards and Credit Cards. - Darren, i know this goes on a bit so feel free to edit it
Gustavo I agree that all taxes and fees should be indlcued in the quoted price from the carriers but credit and debit cards are a difficult issue for a travel agency. Now i'm in the US I'm no longer working for an ABTA or ATOL Agency (Just IATA/ARC and ASTA) I'm not familiar with the situation in the UK but we have to charge a fee for debit card transactions that we process. In most cases we don't charge the card ourselves. For example when airline tickets are issued through our CRS the airline charges the card. In that case there would be no extra charge unless the supplier made it (such as Ryanair does) If, for some reason we have to charge the clients card ourselves we are forced to pass on the fee that is charged by our merchant account. The simple reason for this is that our fee for airline tickets($25) in most cases doesn't cover the 3% merchant fee we have to pay. Since we don't have many of these transactions were not in a position to negotiate better fees. We could include the fee in the prices we quote, but then we would be ripping off' the clients who paid by cheque. Unlike Ryanair, our clients usually have the choice of how they pay and therefore the choice to pay the fee or not. I hate doing it, but i have no choice. The 3% fee we pay applies to both Debit Cards and Credit Cards. - Darren, i know this goes on a bit so feel free to edit it