About $5.1 billion of the ancillary revenue for 2009 was for bag and reservations change fees.
That is, checked-bag fees and $150 penalty fees for making a reservations change remain in effect, while customers continue to have "the flexibility to purchase additional products à la carte," as American put it.
Besides bag check charges and reservations change penalties, the revenue comes from a large and growing array of services and products as airlines devise ever more strategies to become "more active retailers of travel," according to Jay Sorensen, the president of IdeaWorksCompany.
Without any change in the optimalM threshold number, proposed CAC policy in conjunction with bandwidth reservation, changes the reserved area for the nonprioritized calls dynamically upon each new prioritized call arrival.
Of that, airlines gained about $2.7 billion from fees for checked bags and $2.4 billion from penalty fees for reservation changes.
Just how important can be gauged from revenue growth in the two biggest ancillary fee categories, checked bags and reservation changes.
Last year, airlines collected $6 billion just from checked bag fees and reservation changes, up from $1.4 billion in 2007, according to the Department of Transportation.
And these figures do not count the extra fees the airlines now charge, for everything from checked bags to priority boarding to reservation changes or fuel surcharges in international flights.
There's also no extra fees for luggage, last-minute reservation changes or refreshments, all of which are included in the subscription.
