Warning - Monarch airlines 2.5% Maestro Fee

penlondon

I have just booked a flight in July with Monarch airlines to Tenerife and was charged a 2.5% fee for using my Maestro card. So the Maestro Fee charged by Monarch airlines for booking my flight was a crazy £10.32. When I called to complain and ask how they could charge such a fee, I was told that their policy had changed from April 7 and that all airlines are doing it! If I paid by credit card I would have paid a 3.9% fee. This is untrue, Easyjet charge a one off fee of £1.50 only. How can they get away with this? Maestro is the online version of paying cash!

This in my opinion seems like a sneaky way for Monarch Airlines to make more money. Be warned the fee is shown in the right hand corner under fees when booking but nothing is highlighted and no mention is made when you select Maestro.

Horace

Monarch are a law unto themselves - they don't take good care of your luggage either, they totally smashed my hard case in Spain and the only help I got was to be given a premium rate number to call in the UK - needless to say I didnt bother but did have to find and buy a new case which I then billed them for.

bap98189

penlondon wrote: »

How can they get away with this?

Because it's not illegal and people keep booking tickets with them. If they felt they were losing money over it, I am quite sure they would stop charging it. It obviously doesn't put that many people off, after all you still booked your tickets despite the charge.

penlondon wrote: »

Maestro is the online version of paying cash!

This is quite wrong. Many people seem to be under the impression that there is no cost for taking payment by Maestro. I work for a company that takes card payments and I can assure you that businesses have to pay a fee for all card payments whether online or in store. The rate they pay will very much depend how big they are and how good a rate they can negotiate with their bank for processing payments.

However, whilst Maestro payments are not free, in this case, the company is almost certainly profiting from the transaction. Whilst processing credit card transactions is normally a percentage of the transaction amount, debit card transactions are normally charged as a fixed fee per transaction. To give you an idea, when we started our business, we were paying about 60p per transaction for Maestro payments. Now we are somewhat larger, we are paying 28p per transaction to our bank. I am quite sure a company the size of Monarch will be paying even less.