The payment options on Easy Jet website:

Payment for bookings can be made using a wide selection of debit or credit cards (please see the payment stage of the booking process for cards accepted). We do not accept payment by cash or cheques.

New bookings

All bookings will incur a £8.00 booking fee save for bookings made by Visa electron which are free. Bookings made by Visa Credit Card, MasterCard, Diners Club, American Express, Carte Bleue (domestic transactions only) and UATP/Airplus will incur an additional fee of 2.5% of the total transaction value, with a minimum charge of £4.95, whichever is greater.

I had encountered situation like this while paying my hotel bills or airline tickets where they have asked me to pay 2.5% extra, if I pay by credit card. If I was living in stone age then it makes sense to carry cash to pay for the transactions. To the business, it make more business sense to pay by card than by cash / cheque rather than having a person depositing the daily collection by going to the bank everyday. So why these businesses are penalising their customers by charging them extra who pay by credit / debit cards and keep their cash flow.

 The VISA card acceptance guidelines for merchant  (page 11) reads

Always treat Visa transactions like any other transaction. You must not impose surcharge ⁺⁺ on a Visa transaction

Mastercard Rules for the merchant reads

5.11.2 Charges to Cardholders

A Merchant must not directly or indirectly require any Cardholder to pay a surcharge or any part of any Merchant discount or any contemporaneous finance charge in connection with a Transaction. A Merchant may provide a discount to its customers for cash payments. A Merchant is permitted to charge a fee (such as a bona fide commission, postage, expedited service or convenience fees, and the like) if the fee is imposed on all like transactions regardless of the form of payment used, or as the Corporation has expressly
permitted in writing. For purposes of this Rule:

1. A surcharge is any fee charged in connection with a Transaction that is not charged if another payment method is used.
2. The Merchant discount fee is any fee a Merchant pays to an Acquirer so that the Acquirer will acquire the Transactions of the merchant.

So in principle, the merchants are not supposed to charge you anything more than the transaction amount as surcharge or a credit card charge but in practice they rip you off. Recently a consumer group in the UK are stepping up the pressure on the government to make rules to ban such charges.

I just thought of letting you know the merchant guidelines in this regard so that you are informed you are being charged extra. 

Please comment and share your views and let your friends know.

You may also like to read

1. Q/A of credit / debit card charges on BBC

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