Why we charge a service fee (and the big sites mostly don't)

Hannah Okoro, co-founder & CEO · September 26, 2026

When you buy a flight on a large online travel agency, you usually don't see a booking fee. That isn't because selling flights is cheap. It's because, for most of them, the flight isn't where the money is.

What an agency earns on a ticket

Most airlines stopped paying agencies base commission years ago. What's left is small: an incentive from the reservation system for each flight segment booked (a few dollars), occasional override deals with individual airlines, and whatever the agency sells around the ticket. Expedia Group's own annual report for 2025 shows about $407 million of air revenue on roughly 57 million air tickets: around seven dollars a ticket, before the cost of the people who answer the phone when something goes wrong.

So the business model is somewhere else: hotels, which pay agencies a commission of roughly 15–25% of the room rate, plus advertising, travel insurance and add-ons. The flight brings you in; the hotel pays the bills. That's a perfectly reasonable model. It also explains why flight support at big sites is often the part that gets automated first.

What our fee pays for

We do it the other way round. The fare you pay is exactly what the airline publishes for those flights. On top of it there is one flat, disclosed service fee per traveler: $39 for an economy round trip, $59 for premium economy and $89 for business, less for one-way trips. For that you get:

A person, day and night, on one phone number. Our advisors are in New York and Lisbon, so the overnight shift is a daytime shift for someone.
Disruption handling that starts before you call: when an airline cancels or retimes a flight, we see it in the reservation and start rebooking.
Price-drop protection on every booking.
No Farehaven change or cancellation fees, ever. The airline's own rules still apply.

Isn't that more expensive?

On the ticket alone, usually by the fee, yes, and we'd rather say so than hide it in the fare. Across a trip it often isn't: one avoided bag fee, one price drop refunded or one missed connection rebooked onto a seat that would otherwise cost hundreds covers it. We publish the fee so you can make that call yourself. And there is no fee on hotels you book with us.