Dear airlines, it's not OK to charge convenience fee on online booking. Withdraw it

IndiGo Airlines’ website says with effect from 1 May 2015, the convenience fees is Rs 75 per passenger if payment is made through net banking or cash cards and Rs 150 per passenger if payment is made through credit/debit cards when booking is made from its website. It pays online agents like Cleartrip, Makemytrip etc. 2 percent transaction fee in addition to the year end bonus based on volume generated for the airline by them. The agents too on their part charge convenience fees for online payments. Thus direct booking i.e. through the airlines’ website should be cheaper but then it is always not the case because often the agents, confident of earning year-end bonuses, offer discounts to woo customers from airlines’ website as well as from competing online agents. Be that as it may. [caption id=“attachment_2197000” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] Transaction fee is a euphemism for the rather soiled word ‘commission’. It is strictly between the airline and its agent. If the traveler wants to duck its impact he can go directly to the airlines’ website. But convenience fee he cannot duck in any case. Cards are finding increasing use in the country but net banking is still in its infancy at least amongst the households though business and other organizations are adopting it enthusiastically. Those booking through IndiGo website may be tempted to make payment through net banking rather than through cards given the 50 percent savings on convenience fees. Be that as it may again. The moot question is why convenience fee at all. Does a petrol depot charge convenience fees if I pay through cards? No. Does an insurance company charge convenience fee if I pay online premium through cards? No. Does a store charge convenience fee when instead of paying cash you pay through cards? No, though when cards were making their advent in India, some of the stores and shops did charge extra for entertaining card payments. BSES Rajdhani, one of the discom in Delhi charges 1 percent extra only if card payments are in excess of Rs 5,000 in a transaction. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley last month promised to incentivize card payments by offering VAT rebate to establishments and merchants accepting cards and income tax rebate to consumers making card payments beyond a specified threshold. He must prevail upon the trade to not make things difficult for customers by charging outrageous fees like convenience fees. Airlines like any other big customer of Visa and MasterCard negotiate very hard and do not pay the maximum of 3 percent taken by them from lesser mortals. Instead they settle for a very small commission, taken in by the large volumes of business generated by airlines. Visa for example had revenue of $112 billion last year all of which must have trickled into its coffers from worldwide transactions. The Indian Rupay card is functioning reasonably well and its transactions charges are much less than the American companies Visa’s and MasterCard’s. In course of time there may be an exodus to Rupay on the part of Indian traders and service providers. At any rate, convenience fee is levied on the sly by airlines. For had it been otherwise, they would have been more forthright and labeled it as card charges, period. Indian Railways transparently adds the actual card charges imposed by the concerned banks. In fact while booking tickets, one can do a bit of gateway shopping, as it were, so that the overall cost of tickets is minimized. IndiGo on the other hand charges a one-size-fits-all convenience fee of Rs 75/150 per passenger that has no relationship with the fare. It must show grace and withdraw it forthwith because an online booker saves a lot of money for it – commission to agents, overheads in running a sales establishment, interest on moneys blocked in receivables etc. It is just plain squeamish to squeeze more out of an online booker.