Senate Report Criticizes Airlines’ Junk Fee Practices


Luggage motion blurred trolley cart going fast delivering passenger baggage to modern plane on taxiway at airport on bright sunny day.

Skift Take

As millions are set to travel for Thanksgiving this week, the senate subcommittee on investigations released a report that outlined how much revenue airlines have collected from seating and baggage fees.

A senate subcommittee criticized major U.S. airlines for their use of “junk fees” in a report published Tuesday. 

The Senate subcommittee on investigations found that from 2018 to 2023, American, Delta, United, Spirit and Frontier raked in $12.4 billion from seating fees. The report found that seat fee revenue was second only to revenue from baggage fees, which totaled to $25.3 billion for the same airlines. 

However, in 2023, United collected more revenue from seating fees ($1.3 billion) than it did from baggage fees ($1.2 billion) for the first time. 

The committee, headed by Senator Richard Blumenthal, spent a year investigating the five carriers and found that airlines are increasingly relying on algorithms to set fees, causing them to vary significantly betwe