Acceptance Of Airline Ancillary Fees Is The New Reality In New Survey From AirPlus

AirPlus International, a leading global provider of corporate travel payment and analysis solutions, releases August’s The Wire…from AirPlustitled: Ancillary Aggravation Eases. According to the survey’s results, less than half (44 percent) of corporate travel managers are not tracking airline ancillary fees but many are finding ways to review them. Within expense reporting, 38 percent rely on travelers to include fees manually in expense reports, while only 7 percent include fee menus and 15 percent have automated capabilities built in to their expense reporting tools. Other tracking options include five percent who track through their travel management company (TMC) and 11 percent who rely on corporate card data. For more details, including a complimentary PDF of the full survey results, please visit the AirPlus Community.

“We’ve been on record from the start that unbundled pricing for air, hotel and car is the new reality for travel professionals. And we know from our customers that being able to track and manage these expenses is a challenge,” said Richard Crum, President and CEO of AirPlus International, Inc. “Thus, we’ve introduced the first card-based solution in the industry to our Corporate Card customers in the USA - the AirPlus Ancillary Fee Reports. These comprehensive reports consolidate and bring transparency to the hundreds of different airline fees in the market today. The AirPlus Ancillary Fee Reports enable corporations to achieve better policy control, strike clearer negotiations and realize true savings. Our reports do not rely on the individual traveler to mark the correct category in expense reports, but rather the data is derived directly from our intelligent corporate card engine built specifically for these fees.”

The Wire…from AirPlus is a monthly pulse report for the business travel industry on timely and relevant topics. Results of this edition are based on a survey of 101 corporate travel buyers in North America and Europe from June 3 to July 8, 2011.

AirPlus International is a leading business travel payment solution with a payment suite of central bill accounts, corporate cards and online management tools that are used by over 35,000 customers worldwide. AirPlus is travel agency neutral, the leading issuer of UATP worldwide and the preferred partner of various airlines such as Air China, British Airways, Continental Airlines, Luxair, Lufthansa German Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, TAP Portugal and Singapore Airlines. For more information, please visit AirPlus.com, contribute to our community at AirPlus Community, follow us via Twitter and LinkedIn, and like us on Facebook.