Travel News - Airline Fee Increases - Quit Yer Complaining!

The increases in airline fee, like the new, obnoxious Aeroplan fuel surcharges are nuthin' compared to the fees charge to ride a bus!

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- Change.org is rallying consumers around a petition to get Greyhound to eliminate one of the more nonsensical travel fees MainStreet has come across in quite some time.

The bus chain charges an $18 "gift ticket fee" when a credit card holder buys a ticket for someone else online.

In many cases the fee effectively doubles the price of a ticket. And your miles status with Greyhound offers no escape from the fee! The DYKWIA card don't work over there!:p

Could it be that the additional risk of fraud and therefore chargebacks for tickets puchased online for other than the cardholder averages $18 per ticket?

Yeah, when airlines match megabus dollar fares or Greyhounds eighteen dollar fares people will stop complaining.

When the airline fee increase is ten times the bus fare, people will complain.

"The ticket fee is a fraud-protection fee," explained Maureen Richmond, a Greyhound spokeswoman. "It counteracts the costs that we incur for protecting the customer and the company from credit card fraud."

She said the fee also represents a handling charge because the recipient of the ticket will have to pick it up at a Greyhound bus depot.

"You could always buy it yourself and then mail it to someone else," Richmond said. "That way you can avoid the fee."

Grey Hound could just call a spade a spade..

and call it a fraud protection fee..:)

Just take the cheap Chinatown buses. They're $25 or less, all the way down to $8 for some routes on sale. True, you stand a better chance of being killed when your unlicensed driver rolls the bus, but you'll be way ahead on costs.