For some time now, the airline ticket booking business in India has going through turmoil. As airlines are facing a tough time financially, they have told agents that tickets booked by agents will no longer get commission to the agents. The way that the business used to go was, when a ticket was booked by an agent for an airline, the agent used to get a commission for the booking, approx Rs. 350 to Rs. 500. But with the decision to do away with the commissions, airlines faced a revolt from these agents who threatened to boycott them. Having said that, consumers should have benefited from this decision, since the fee should now be deducted from the airline tickets. However, in an unprecedented action, airlines are still charging consumers the same amount, apparently under pressure from agents who don’t want airlines to start selling at a reduced rate, even if the tickets are being sold directly:

Aviation fuel may have got cheaper on Saturday, but flying has become much more expensive. India’s three full service airlines — AI, Jet and Kingfisher — started levying a transaction surcharge on tickets sold by them. This surcharge is exactly similar to the fee that agents now charge — Rs 350 and Rs 500 for economy and business-class domestic flights and between Rs 1,200 to Rs 10,000 for international ones.
This means that there’s no escaping this additional charge whether people buy tickets from agents who moved over to the new system after airlines stopped paying them any commission from Saturday, or directly from the carriers. A senior airline official claimed that this was done under pressure from travel agents. “Agents told us that if we sell tickets cheaper than them, agencies would find it hard to get business. So we had no option as 85% of all tickets are sold by agents and they have threatened to boycott the three biggest Indian airlines,” the official said, clearly happy that airlines will pocket this entire amount.

This is an act that is vehemently anti-customer. If the airlines are having a commercial dispute with their agents, why should the customer have to pay extra; the airline is happy since it gets additional payment. The agent is happy since there is no under-cutting of their business and customers don’t feel any difference between buying the ticket from the airline and from the agent.

Till some time back, the various Government run PSU’s and other departments always felt that they were not providing a service that could be challenged in court; that options such as consumer laws were only possible to be implemented if people had taken a service from a private company. It was only when they started getting castigated and losing cases in consumer forums and courts did the Government undertakings realize that they were also subject to the same laws and conditions as anybody else. And of course, as the economy opened up, and there was increased competition, this competition also drove the Government run departments to either shape up or lose out. The Railways has opened up somewhat and improved, but still there needs to be more improvement, as can be seen from this case:

AHMEDABAD: A consumer court has asked the Western Railway to pay Rs 6000 to a commuter for issuing journey ticket for wrong date and not cancelling the same. The court held that verification of details in ticket is primarily the railway staffers’ responsibility.
After hearing both the sides, member of the Forum, Jyotiben Jani concluded that it was the deficiency of service on part of railway authority, because despite mention of one date in requisition form, the booking clerk issued ticket of altogether different date. Hence, the Western Railway has been asked to pay Rs 400 as refund to ticket, besides Rs 600 for conveyance charges and Rs 5000 towards compensation for causing mental harassment to Malviya.

Overall this a good sign. Imagine the problem that would have been caused had the ticket not be cancelled, and been attempted to be used on the actual date of the journey. This would have revealed that the ticket was for a different date, and the person would have been left in a lurch, unable to make the journey.

This was very surprising. I was trying to book a ticket from Srinagar back to Delhi for around the 3rd week of June, and started with the regular websites that I was using - Yatra.com and MakemyTrip.com. They both seemed to have around the same lowest fare, on Spicejet. So this seemed fine and I was about to go ahead and make the booking, but then a thought struck about going to the website of the airline directly - in this case, SpiceJet.com
This ticket was being booked for 3 people, and hence the total amount quoted for the booking on Yatra was around Rs. 12,000 (slightly less than that). So imagine my surprise when I went to the airline website and got the ticket for 3 people at around Rs. 1200 less (around Rs. 10,800). This is a decent amount of saving, and not something to mock at, and so set a policy for next time to go to the website of the respective airline to check the prices over there as well.
I wonder whether this was a mistake, or did the website such as Yatra charge extra on some specific times, I can’t imagine them being successful if they start charging extra for every ticket that they sell (most customers will catch on and then avoid booking tickets with them).