Why It’s Cheaper To Get Delta Tickets In The Airport.
I find the low cost carrier business model intriguing. These airlines, which include Spirit, Frontier, Delta, and shortly to be Sun Country, offer rock bottom fares and then make their money with piles of charges. You can pretty much expect to cover almost everything out of a chair assignment to a beverage, and everything in between.
Among the more intriguing fees that Spirit has is that which amounts to a convenience fee for his or her website. If you didn’t understand better, you’d believe you were buying a ticket to a show from Ticketmaster! Except in this case, the flight is your show.
They call it the passenger use charge and it can be up to $18.99 each ticket.
Interestingly, there is some quantity of logic behind this fee. Airlines need to pay a 7.5% federal excise tax on the ticket price. But they don’t cover the tax on charges. Therefore it saves them 7.5% on about $19, which essentially lets them maintain an additional $1.40 on each ticket.
Multiply that by thousands and thousands of tickets every single day, also, you get the idea.
However, to get away with calling it a commission, not only a part of the fare, there has to be way of never paying it. And also the way to not cover it is to book the ticket in the airport, in person, using a broker. Sneaky, eh?
I actually booked a ticket on Spirit for my mother-in-law in the Denver airport recently just to test out how this worked in practice. It turned out to be very simple, mainly because I got lucky and got there during a Sunday morning lull. I was in and out in less than five minutes.
Had I wished to buy a ticket on the afternoon of my first ever Spirit excursion in June, nevertheless…
Delta Air optional services and fees.
Delta Air has their very own version of this Ticketmaster charge. They call it the Digital Carrier Usage Charge plus it amounts to $13.00 per passenger, per section, to each of airline reservations booked via the website or call centre.
The kind of hilarious point to me is that right below the Digital Carrier Usage Charge is your Phone Center Booking Fee, which naturally can also be per passenger and per section.
Delta Air "optional" reservation charges.
Save yourself money by buying Delta Air tickets in the airport.
To eliminate calling the Digital Carrier Usage Charge an optional charge, it has to be discretionary. Much like Spirit, they allow you stay away from that charge by buying your tickets in the airport. Of course, they don’t explicitly tell you that since they don’t really want you to buy your tickets in the airport.
That not only increases their staffing costs but in addition, it cuts into their earnings. Even if they avoid the 7.5% federal excise tax on the 13, they still pocket the remainder.
The Delta Air FAQs encourages you to book your tickets through the website (where you’ll cover the $13 fee) or via the call centre ($13 fee, and $14.99 call centre charge). They then say that tickets for same day travel could be bought in the airport ticket counter according to availability. And that the hours vary by location.
Delta Air frequently asked questions.
In most cities delta airlines corporate phone number, airport ticket purchase will be accessible for one hour following each scheduled death.
Thus Delta will offer you a ticket for same day travel in the airport, but just for one hour following departure.
Then there is a link to the booking page where you can ostensibly discover the departure time to your regional airport.
The somewhat perplexing thing, at least me, is that there is also a table of times for select airports. My very best guess is that these airports have several flights every day, so rather than simply stating "an hour after scheduled death," it makes more sense to define the hours during which you are able to buy a ticket. Again, only my guess.
Delta Air ticket counter hours in select airports.
Delta also lists stations where service hasn’t yet started, but in which tickets could apparently still be bought. And also a list of addresses for individuals having trouble finding the airport. You might laugh, but these are mostly tiny airports, so that it might actually make sense.
Bottom line.
In the case of Delta, you need to save 13 per person per section.
The challenge is that Delta flies a very sparse schedule so that their airport counters are just open for a very limited number of hours every week. But if this works for your program, it could be rewarding. And should you’re flying as a household, these savings could accumulate fast.
Perhaps you have bought Delta Air tickets in the airport?