Delta Air Lines charges extra fees for passengers who use travel agents


Many airlines have had online booking bonuses, internet only fares, or mileage fares. Some of those special fares are more restrictive than standard fares. Ditto, consolidator fares can have higher fees for changes.

Now Delta Air Lines is up to something new. An extra fee for clients who change any ticket originally booked by a travel agent. Note this correction: The fee is not new, only newly discovered.

This situation was called to my attention by a reader. At first I thought she must be mistaken. She wasn’t. A business traveler she had booked had needed to call Delta on the weekend due to an emergency to change a ticket.

The Delta agent agreed to do it, but for a $150 change fee, which the client expected, and a $50 additional fee because the first ticket had been issued by a travel agent. When the client reported it to his travel manager, the manager immediately called Delta and they verified the policy; no exceptions for elite level fliers.

When it happened to the agency’s second client, the enterprising manager went to Delta.com. There he discovered that because it was a travel agent booking, the reservation could not be changed online. So he had to go back and grumpily pay the fee.

I did my own investigating today, once posing as a traveler and not an agent, and the only real difference I discovered from what my reader had told me, was that a couple Delta reservations agents just told me it would be a $200 fee for changes, and only upon prodding did they divulge that $50 was because it was booked through a travel agent.

One helpful gentleman did suggest the same day “confirmed standby” rule, where if it was within three hours of the new flight, Delta would charge a flat $50, the same if it was booked direct or through an agency.

Clearly Delta is not alone in trying to squeeze every possible dime from customers when possible, but this policy seems particularly offensive. Especially as during the recent storms in many U.S. cities, including the airline’s Atlanta hubs, travel agents did a great deal of unpaid work in rebooking and reissuing Delta tickets when planes were delayed and canceled.

And often Delta’s hold times were well over an hour, or a phone call to the airline simply elicited a busy signal, so travelers had no choice but to try to contact their agent, no matter what day of the week or time it happened to be. (I personally didn’t have any Delta travelers stuck, but had emails and calls that went as late as 1 a.m. and as early as 6 a.m. from clients with other airlines.)

In fact, as many travel agents also discovered last week, including in our office, many travelers who HAD booked direct with airline websites to save money called agencies in a panic. Of course, they needed help with their canceled or delayed flights because they couldn’t reach their airline.

Moreover, in more normal weather times, when airline schedule changes make a ticketed itinerary unusable, Delta is one airline that REQUIRES travel agents to reissue the tickets with the new flights, rather than having the client take care of it at the airport. (And does the airline pay agents for the extra work, which not only involves issuing a new ticket but filling out an exchange notice? Absolutely not.)

So, to sum up. Delta Air Lines has decided that they will not pay agents for bookings, they will expect travel agents to fix their schedule changes and canceled flights (and pay the costs of ticket reissue), but if an agent is actually unavailable at any time, or a client decides not to bother their agent after hours, they will make sure clients pay the price for not booking direct.

Not exactly the actions of a travel partner.

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