Airline ticket sellers make marketing lemonade out of DOT's lemons
Skift Take
Is it too much to ask to see the total price of an airfare, hotel room or car rental up-front? The DOT rule is a positive step forward; this stuff can't be left to the free market.
Since January, airlines have been forced to display the total price of airfares up-front, including all government taxes and fees, and they had to be dragged into doing it -- sometimes kicking and screaming.
Despite all the free-market rhetoric about the deregulation of the airline industry and global distribution systems, it is interesting to note that it took the DOT's new price advertising rule to force the OTAs and airlines to do a very simple, consumer-friendly thing: tell us what the price of the ticket is up-front.
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