Consumers aren't the only ones wincing at checked bag fees -- some corporations are mulling pulling travel spending from airlines with heavy ancillary fees.
In fact, in a recent survey of 66 travel management pros in North America and Europe, 27.3% said they "have considered shifting share/changing suppliers based on fees."
"Respondent comments indicated that share shifting, at least, had gone beyond the consideration stage to taking action," says AirPlus International, which conducted the survey April 30 to May 13 in cooperation with Promedia travel.
And, nearly 38% of respondents said fees make their supplier relationships "more difficult to manage."
One of the chief difficulties for travel managers is they can't manage ancillary fees because many can't capture the data.
In fact, half of respondents "indicated that their travelers have no visibility into ancillary fee charges at the time of booking a business trip through their travel management company," AirPlus says.
So travel managers are leaning on airlines, expense-reporting solutions and hotel chains to provide more visibility into spending on ancillary services, AirPlus says.
Some corporations are requesting that payment solutions identify charges of $50 or less, with the assumption that these must be for ancillary fees, says AirPlus, a payment-solution provider.
Corporate travel buyers often find themselves in the predicament of trying to manage spend when the details aren't broken down in post-trip reports.
Many travel management companies hope this dilemma will be resolved when the Airline Tariff Publishing Company implements fare-filing capabilities for optional services and industry standards for Electronic Miscellaneous Documents are adopted.
Of course, to make EMDs work, airlines in particular would have to endorse them -- and many carriers have yet to signal their intent to do so.