By Carly Coombs | Posted: Nov. 18, 2024 | Updated: Sep 15, 2025

Delta plane on the runway at the Salt Lake City International Airport in Salt Lake City, Utah.

If you are planning on flying a budget airline soon, there’s a possibility you can get your tickets cheaper by purchasing them in person at the airport.

Frontier is a budget carrier that departs from Salt Lake City airport and allows customers to avoid carrier fees by buying tickets at the airport.

The practice is common among budget airlines (Breeze and Allegiant do the same at the Provo airport) since these airlines often apply “optional” fees to tickets when customers purchase online or over the phone.

Because these fees are considered optional (since you can avoid them at the airport), airlines don’t have to pay the 7.5% federal excise tax that is added to base fares in the U.S., saving the airline a bit of cash.

Frontier adds an additional fee — a “carrier interface charge” — and all of its tickets when customers book online or over the phone. The fee is up to $23 per segment, and you can see exactly how much it will cost you by looking at your flight online at checkout before purchasing.

For Frontier, I looked up a round-trip ticket from SLC to Denver. For this flight, the carrier interface charge was $20 on a flight that’s $64 total. If you book at the airport, that brings your total down to $44.

For flights with a layover, the carrier interface charge adds up since the fee applies to each segment. On this flight from SLC to Orlando, Florida, with one layover each way, the carrier interface charge amounts to $92. So buying at the airport would bring this flight from $169 to $77.

If you’re flying on Frontier, the cheapest ticket price won’t include bags, seat selection, etc., with those services garnering an additional fee. If you need to add extras like bags, it will cost you more at the airport. But luckily, you can add extras online after you purchase the initial flight, allowing you to get the cheapest price.

Ticket counters for Frontier are open during certain hours of the day in Salt Lake City. Frontier’s website says its ticket counters typically open two hours before a departing flight and close an hour before departure (you can look at the airport’s flight board here).