Airline Ticket Prices 2014: TSA Screening Fee Causing Rise in Cost of Air Travel
Airline tickets will be more expensive starting Monday when a government fee for passenger screening will more than double.
The Transportation Security Administration added a fee after 9/11 to fund passenger screening, which was $2.50 per one-way ticket, with a cap of $10 per trip, and will increase to more than $5 with no cap, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The cap has been removed, allowing each flight in a trip to see an additional screening fee if the layover is longer than four hours on a domestic flight. This is the first change to the fee since it was first implemented in 2002.
So a passenger with a four-flight trip with more than four hours between each flight might see almost $24 added to the total cost of the trip.
The only exception might be for domestic flights to Hawaii and Alaska, which can have layover times of 12 hours, according to The New York Times.
Each round-trip domestic flight will have new a fee of $11.20, more than double the current $5.
"Policy makers see air passengers as an ATM," Sharon Pinkerton, senior vice president for legislative and regulatory policy at the lobbying group Airlines for America, told the WSJ.
But this new method for raising funds by taxing passengers is just the latest in a line of recent changes in the industry.
Airlines have raised billions of dollars a year in revenue by charging baggage fees, priority seat fees, boarding priority fees and increasing fees for cancellations or ticket changes.
And more changes are being proposed.
Airports are trying to raise the facility fees charged to passengers -- from $4.50 to $8 -- and Customs and Border Protection wants to increase the immigration fee on international tickets by $2 to $9.
The current change to the TSA fees will raise more than $12 billion in the next 10 years.
"This change will disproportionately hurt consumers from small and rural communities who must often use more one-way trips to reach their final destination," Nicholas E. Calio, president and chief executive of Airlines for America, wrote in a letter March 28, according to The New York Times.
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