A few years ago, many airlines were doing everything they can to drive customers to their lowest-cost distribution method: their own website. As such, fees for telephone booking and booking at the airport were added, in order to encourage people that still used those options to the website, and to recover the added cost from those that didn't.

What was announced recently by one airline, whereby they were charging a $5 "convenience fee" to book on the website but offered free in-person ticketing at the airport, is quite interesting. It's obviously more expensive to handle a transaction in person at the airport than on the website, yet there's a surcharge to use the website. It seems obvious to me that the airline realized that it can make far more money from charging for website use than it would lose from people that would prefer to ticket in person at the airport and run up labor expense. So, they offer the more expensive option (to the airline) for free just to be able to say "that's the base price" even though they know that most customers will be using the telephone or website. As such, they can effectively charge $5 more per ticket than their competitors yet not appear to do so when comparison shopping.