Airlines face all-in airfare advertising

Written on December 19, 2011.

The Government of Canada will proceed with regulations requiring airlines to include all surcharges, fees and taxes in their advertised prices. The new all-in airfare advertising regulations will apply to advertising in all media, including on the Internet, of prices for air services within, or originating in, Canada offered by both Canadian and foreign airlines.

It was stated in the Transport Canada News Release of December 16, 2011 that the government “is committed to enhancing consumer protection while promoting fair competition by ensuring greater transparency of advertised airfares for Canadian travellers”. The Canadian Transportation Agency will begin stakeholder consultations and preparation of the regulations, a process that is expected to take approximately one year.

It will be interesting to see whether the new regulations will also require disclosure of the numerous governmental charges, duties and taxes and airport improvement fees collected by airlines, or whether these payments will disappear within the all-in airfare pricing. 

When the initial move in this direction was made by Transport Canada in 2007, Canadian airlines were concerned about whether the proposed regulations for all-in airfare pricing would apply equally to all airlines, for both domestic and international, against which they competed. Now that governments in the United States and the European Union have moved to all-in airfare advertising, those concerns would no longer apply. The United States has further strengthening regulations requiring all-in airfare advertising that are scheduled to come into effect on January 24, 2012.