A.J: First, Welcome to FT!
While I appreciate your decision to present your perspective, the above reads more like a rant than good information. It also avoids the obvious points raised in the thread.
It may well be true that a TA may decide that competition demands that he too must advertise fares without taxes and surcharges. However, that does not mean that he can still claim that fares include all taxes and surcharges!
That is the reported problem with your website---not the practice of quoting fares without taxes, which is common enough, but outright lying and dishonesty about what you are doing.
Such lying is
not standard practice among good TA's. Most
do tell us what they are doing. Just about every ad in the travel section of my Indian newspaper does that (sometimes there are as many asterisk as dollar signs). Or, look at the following well-respected agency for the Japan market:
http://www.jtbusa.com/en/default.asp. The "special airfare chart" to the right uses expressions like "from $738" and not just "$738". For every single price. At the bottom there is a clear statement that "Fuel surcharge is included; Taxes and fees are not included".
These are your competitors, subject to the
same market considerations as you are. I suggest you learn from and follow the best business standards instead of practicing and defending sleaze.
In your post above you write
"In my experience working for ITN, over 2 years now, I am used to hear all kinds of accusations and being pointed out different forums where people write a lot of bad reviews. This is obviously natural, since...pleasing every single client is simply impossible..." That is absolute rubbish and it is far from "obviously natural" that businesses should get a lot of bad reviews just because they don't please every customer. Check out JTB's reviews and compare with yours. Or check vendor ratings at Amazon - you will see ratings from one star to five stars.
In any event, FT community is quite educated about and experienced with travel and your kind of fudging explanation will not wash here.