How do you know if hotels have gone too far with fees? When Jay Sorensen complains about them.
Sorensen runs a Shorewood, Wis., consulting firm focused on helping travel companies generate money through surcharges and is a self-described “fee advocate.” But on a recent hotel stay in the Azores, he needed his shirts and pants pressed. A hotel clerk assured him that it could be done the same day.
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Amtrak is raising its luggage fees on Sept. 10, the national rail carrier disclosed on its website today.
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Editor’s note: This is part four of my series on becoming a successful travel blogger. Here’s the first one, the second one and the third one.
Let’s talk about money.
If you’re going to be a successful travel blogger, you’ll need some to pay your Internet service provider and web designer. You’ll have to pony up cold, hard cash for the equipment I recommended in the second part of this series.
It would be nice to have a little left over to pay the rent, too.
People think you have to take the vow of poverty when you become a travel blogger, or that your “payment” is press trips. Not necessarily.
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To get an idea where this nonsense with hidden fees is headed, consider what just happened at Ticketmaster.
The ticket broker, which has been harshly criticized for not featuring an “all-in” price for its tickets, announced to the world yesterday that it would rebundle its prices.
“We get it,” wrote Ticketmaster’s CEO, Nathan Hubbard. “You don’t like service fees.”
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What’s an airline ticket?
Is it just an agreement to carry you from point A to point B? Or is there more to it?
Airline executives seem to think that a ticket is a seat on a plane, and that’s all. Lately, the industry has been busy unbundling services that traditionally came with a seat, such as baggage checking, seat reservations and even the ability to pay by credit card.
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My friend Addison Schonland said it best: Anyone who thinks baggage fees are going away is living on another planet. And as if to underscore that point, IdeaWorks has released a survey that shows ancillary revenue is up 345 percent from 2006, to an eye-popping $10 billion last year.
Is this a losing fight for airline passengers?
I’ll get to the answer in a second. But first, let’s have a look at these incredible numbers.
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