Originally Posted by
yamanote8
It looks like they add this arbitrary fee whenever ticketing has to manually price the fare, i.e. applicable to both chat or telephone.
Even making a booking request via the online form is incurring the arbitrary fee, as experienced on my request for SIN-BKK on CX. The quotation is still generated offline /manually by some agent, as it takes 24-48hours for QR to get back to you on the request.