To me that is totally fine. If there are electives, then elective them. Fix the mandatory ones first. Like the “resort fee” hotels charge. Or “cleaning fees”.

It becomes trickier when the fee is elective, but a significant part of the advertisement. Southwest Airlines complaining about having to advertise their fares, which come with two bags included, alongside other airlines who don’t include any bags comes to mind. I think there is probably some world where elective fees are included as well though this seems more nebulous.

However, let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: Even just including everything that is compulsory in the base price itself, including taxes, would be a massive improvement to the status quo. Fixing this elective fee ambiguity would be a next step

Did you...actually read what they wrote there?

The (hypothetical) airfare was listed as "free", but it was impossible to end up paying less than $1200 for it.

The point being that even if you have a choice between several fees (making none of them "mandatory" by a narrow reading), you're still paying something beyond the advertised base price.

The logical good-faith rule in a case like this would be that you must advertise at least the minimum price anyone would end up paying based on the available "fee choices".

I'd go a little farther and say that if there are impractical scenarios to avoid the fee it still must be included. (Say, no fee if you pay the fare in Timbuktu.) Advertise it based on the 95th percentile of what actually happens.

That's very easily solved: The minimum total price of all possible selectable options is the cheapest price that can be legally advertised. Treat non-viable options that just exist as a false baseline as false advertisement, just like it's already illegal to e.g. send out a flyer advertising TVs for $1, but there's only one available at the other end of the state/country.

It's really not a practical problem in any country that has the appropriate laws. The only thing it takes to fix this is the political will to do so.

I recently ordered cake for $x, with a mandatory selection of "size". The only possible size was "large", which cost an add-on fee of $3. Just make that type of stuff illegal yesterday. Absolutely nothing of value will be lost.

The ACTUAL solution to these problems that HN always seems to be allergic to (because technicians prefer technical solutions, but humans aren't technical) is to make your court system extremely hostile to "clever" bullshit like this.

This insistence at having EXACT WORDS for things that aren't exact is just naivety, thinking the world is can be divided perfectly into categories if we just make the categories specific enough!

You cannot.

Excellent point. In the end the rules are simply words on paper, they must be enforced. So the exact verbiage is less important. But the lack of ambiguity is extremely important. I'll give an example:

- In the EU, what can legally be defined as a "sale" price (e.g. 20% off till Friday! deals) uses very precise verbiage that states an item must be at a certain percentage higher for a specific period of time (typically 30 days) to constitute a sale.

- In the USA, the regulations basically say that companies should make a good faith effort to not deceive consumers with sale prices. It leaves defining what a good faith effort is as an exercise to the reader (states).

The end result is that you have a lot more misleading price info in the States, since all manner of questionably legal manipulation tactics are used and enforcement of this is lax.

So what happens when you buy that ticket and don't pay any of the fees? If you get taken to Hawaii then they're in the clear. If they won't take you without you paying the fee then I guess the fee wasn't optional after all.

Buy the ticket how? Look at the fees for paying--you can't actually buy the ticket without paying for it.

Well I think advertising a price that you can't get the ticket for needs to be banned.

(To answer the actual question, I was assuming bank transfer, that's the normal cheapest payment option where I live)

It looks like the price is $1200, as that's the price for the cheapest practical combination of options. An airline could advertise this as $1200.