Jacki Huba of the Church of the Customer Blog argues, from the customer's perspective (of course), that "fees are penalties, always."  And cites the growth of no-fee-for-bags airlines as evidence of her argument Southwest Airlines and JetBlue each saw significant jumps in passenger miles and the percentage of seats filled last month while Delta, American, USAirways, and United--all of which charge for checked bags--saw declines in both categories. 

Huba writes:

Before you say, "You can't correlate those two things, Jackie!" let it be noted that Southwest has commissioned several studies that show the traveling public hates bag fees.

Southwest seems to be doing pretty well as angry passengers migrate away from the bag-fee chargers. Southwest is even running an ad campaign with this message, called "Why do they hate your bags?"

Those nickle and dime fees add up, the airlines will say, but really, they do little more than penalize customers with complexity and disguise the end price. It's no different when a phone or cable company charges activation fees. May as well call them aggravation fees, as in "It's aggravating to have a new customer."

Read the full post here.