I buy a ticket with a low cost carrier for 99 cents. When the time comes arrangements change, I decide not to travel. After all I'm only losing 99 cents. Then there's the government tax and the U.K. air duty, another 25 EUROs!
Who gets the 25 EUROs. Is that still payable to H.M. or is that a nice little earner for the carrier?

sam sip

Flowman,

I have just had exactly the same problem, or rather my wife has, as she is the travel expert. We were off to the States on holiday, but she was sick and we had to cancel.

When we applied to the insurance for ticket refund, we got the ticket money but without the tax etc. We were told that this was the responsibility of the airline.

We contacted the airline who said they needed the tickets back - of course these were with the Insurance Company following our claim. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with letters, we got the tickets back, sent them off to the airline and eventually got the refund.

However how this would work with a ticketless Company, I don't know

You have stumbled on a really nice scam Flowman.

If you cancel a non-refundable ticket, and as part of the total price of the ticket you paid an airport passenger user fee that was collected by the airline, then that money goes straight in to the pocket of the airline, unless you have the wit to try and get them to pay you back that fee.

If you do not go through that airport because you do not fly on that ticket, then the airline does not pay that fee to the airport on your behalf.

There were a couple of press articles about this scam around 18 to 24 months ago, if I remember rightly.

yep,
and apart from having to pay a premium rate phonecall they answer back that they don't refund it.. basically "tough sh*t" is what we were told by the call centre.

Not totally a scam if you have bought a non refundable ticket, get the word "non-refundable" ?

Air Passenger Duty (APD) is £5.00 per person for intra EU flights
and £20.00 per person for outside of the EU.

Passenger taxes and security fee's at airports like Gatwick are
around £7.00 and some regionals even more. These are only charged by the airline (or HM Customs in the case of APD)
if you travel therefore money in the airlines pocket if you dont, the reason I say its not a scam is you are buying non refundable tickets - and by the meaning of the word you shouldnt expect
money back from that airline if you dont travel, non-refundable tickets by their very nature should be the cheapest, having your cake and eating it springs to mind


rt

But surely the question does not concern the refunding of the price of the ticket but the fact that the tax is either the pax or the tax man's (airport), and not the carriers at any point?

The carrier is only the collector of taxes not the ultimate beneficiary.

If the tax is paid it should go to those who collect it, if it is not incurred because the pax did not travel then it should be returned to the pax. Quite a scam I would say.

Don't tar all airlines with the same brush. When I was ill last year and had to cancel flights with Buzz, I rang them up, gave them the booking number, and the tax was refunded to my credit card the same day.

However, when Gordon Brown announced in April that APD on flights to some non-EU countries like Cyprus, Malta, Turkey and Switzerland would come down from £20 to £5 this November, some stingy tour operators refused to refund the tax to people who had already booked holidays leaving after 1 November. BA, EasyJet, BA Holidays and Kirker said they would give refunds, but Thomson, Airtours, Thomas Cook and First Choice said they could whistle for their money. Now if the tax had gone up, presumably that would be a different matter... :(


The question is, if some companies can do it, why can't they all? :confused:

I have just (on principle!) tried to get the departure tax back for some flights from Ryanair. (I called but have yet to write.)

The tax is not due unless you actually leave the ground in the aircraft.

HOWEVER - the booking conditions specifically state tax is not refundable, so it is a profitable scam, HM Customs apparently can do nothing as no tax is being avoided as none is due.

Some airlines (I have not got a list) have signed up to a code of practice where they will refund tax - Rayanair is not one of them.

According to standard IATA rules it would appear the tax should be repaid - but IATA is an airline club and so the airlines can choose to write T&C's to avoid the refunds.

Now if only I could apply this type of approach to my personal taxes...

P.S. Just for info... I found could not fly with Ryanair on the day of travel - but rebooked the same day to fly to Rome with BA for less than £90 return - and will do so again if I can!


(Edieted 4 trypoes.)

Memetic

Well that explains it rather well. I now see the logic of selling 1,000,000 tickets at 99 cents. If just 10% of the passengers do not turn up, the airline collects 2.5 million Euros for doing sweet F.A..

Codes of practice seldom work. As always there will be those who will sign up to and honour the terms of such a code who will be disadvantaged by the remainder who do not sign up.

A good scam indeed! Furthermore, if the taxman says no tax is due because none is owed, does that mean this money collected as tax becomes tax free income for the airline?

flowman

(Edited for further scam)

Anyone tried this with easyJet? Am not intending to travel on a flight in December and wouldn't mind the tax refunded.

Also, why is it that the tax quoted by some carriers is different than others for the same route? For example, I try to book a flight from LHR-JFK. On 4th December, returning on the 11th. With American, the fare is £152.00 + £49.90 tax, but with BA the fare is £133.00 + £63.30 tax. Then for United it's £146.00 + £58.30 tax!!

The flights arrive and depart at essentially the same times, so how can the tax be different for every airline if it has nothing to do with them?

Apart from Air Passenger Duty which is £20 for outside the EU and £5.00 for intra EU destinations the "tax" isnt a "tax" in the true sense of the word and not paid to HM Customs & Excise - its a "tax" thats applied by the airport authority for useage of the airport facilities its also not a landing fee thats a different charge on the airline !


rt

Tax or not, it's a payment collected in lieu of payment due to somebody else. If that payment is not passed on to that third party then it is a scam, a nice little earner. What I would like to know is, does the airline pay tax to the inland revenue on this unearned income?
I should say that I have not used a low cost operator and have never tried to obtain a refund of these "levies". I am just interested in the workings of what is obviously a nice sideline for some low cost carriers and unscrupulous charter operators.

flowman

Bunch of thieving bandits.

I had to book a flight and went to the website. The price of the flights was different, nothing wrong with that. But the tax was higher on the cheaper flight. How can that be unless they are cheating us?

Same airline. Same aircraft type. Same route. Same day. Just different departure times. Sounds like a scam to me.

MOVED -

To Questions or Ground Ops............PC...........Not So Fantastic

From The Irish Times 23rd January:

"In the twelve months to the end of March 2002, 889,000 of Ryanair's paying customers did not take their flights......On the basis of 6.55 Euros [Dublin airport charges] Ryanair would have added close to 6 million Euros to its bottom line profits."

Add the taxes and other charges and that 6 million Euros grows to well over 10 million Euros.

Interestingly the Consumers association of Ireland says that they "are going to have to make some attempt to identify passengers and refund this money"!

Should be fun.

flowman

:D

Any chance of posting the whole article from the Irish Times or providing a free link?

A friend of mine tried getting Ryanair to refund the APD part of an unrequired flight - he realised that the fare would be forfeited, but thought that since APD is based on departing passengers and he wasn't going to be one that Ryanair should pay back his money. Their excuse is that it costs more in admin to do this!! OK, so there is an admin cost, but they are obtaining money on the basis of what UK Customs & Excise require and the fact that they pocket it helps their revenue unfairly. Another example of how Ryanair boosts its revenues beyond the money it charges for its flights - others include overcharging for the tickets for the bus from Dublin Airport to Dublin City as I found to my cost. I thought they were doing me a favour, but in fact it was more expensive to buy the ticket on the plane than if I'd bought it on the bus!


On the APD subject how are Ryanair avoiding adding APD to their infamous 50p fares to Hahn?

As for differences in Tax charged by other airlines - I think it's time that airlines defined more clearly what these cover, since otherwise they should wrap them into the fare and only add on APD which is out of the control of the airline.

The Irish Times is now subscription only. The following article is taken from today’s Irish Independent:

Probe into Ryanair 'no refund' claim

THE Director of Consumer Affairs is taking legal advice following accusations that Ryanair pocketed around €25m of passengers' money.


The allegations were made at a Dail committee meeting after Aer Rianta chairman Noel Hanlon said the airline had made no effort to refund government taxes and airport charges to "no show" customers.


Consumer Affairs Director Carmel Foley reacted last night by saying that she was taking legal advice on the charges and duties made by airlines flying from Irish airports to the UK and Europe.


In particular, she was "concerned at the lack of clarity in respect of the payments to airport operators and the refund policies of airlines in circumstances where consumers cancel or do not take up the flight booked".


The row erupted on Tuesday when the Oireachtas Transport Committee was told that last year there were 900,000 "no show" Ryanair passengers.


Each passenger would have to pay €27 on a ticket for taxes, airport charges and insurance. This was calculated to be a total of €25m. However, Ryanair claimed that Aer Rianta was trying to spread misinformation and said it had come a week before the report on a second terminal.



Martha Kearns - Irish Independent

Vortex
*****
Bunch of thieving bandits.

I had to book a flight and went to the website. The price of the flights was different, nothing wrong with that. But the tax was higher on the cheaper flight. How can that be unless they are cheating us?

Same airline. Same aircraft type. Same route. Same day. Just different departure times. Sounds like a scam to me.

******

Did you fly into LCY?? or MAN??

Rules for LCY is interesting.

(From IATA Airport and Air Navigation CHarges Manual 2002
for LONDON CITY (LCY) )


Passenger Charge
(per arriving pax)

Peak
International GBP 13.25
Domestic GBP 7.00

Off Peak
International GBP 11.75
Domestic GBP 6.25


Peak Periods 07.45 - 0915 Mon to Fri
1745 - 1900 Friday and Sunday and Public Holidays

Of Peak All other times!




*****

MAN is even more confusing.
They charge you not only based on the time of the day but also
the month of travel as well as for heavier aircraft on domestic routes.

And unlike LCY, MAN charges for Departing pax .

Cheapest - £ 1 for Departures from Nov to April from 2000 to 2159
It goes upto £8.09 for some peak time international departures during May to October.

It is high time some standardisation is introduced!



Anyway this is the reason for , the situation you faced.

Regards

I have also come across this problem when using staff travel. You know when you buy a standby ticket and then don't end up using it? Obviously you've paid tax on that ticket and don't even cancel as such! I know a friend who bought a standby to the USA and paid the £50+ taxes/ psc and when he put in for a refund they told him that it would cost £50 in admin fees to type his credit card refund into the machine, despite obviously having just typed it into the machine to refund the ticket price!! That was BA if I rmember rightly.

Had a similar thing with Flybe last summer.
Noisy jnr went across to England on his annual visit to his Grandparents for 2 weeks. This involves me flying him over and Mrs Noise going over 2 weeks later to bring him back. Problem was, he wasn't very well over there and wanted to come back at the start of week 2. Rather than spend more money on a new rtn for me or the mrs, we persuaded the little cherub to fly as an UM.
All worked out fine and he perked up once he was back in God's country.

Mrs Noise spoke to Flybe about the unused half of junior's ticket and her own unused rtn. They said to write to them explaining and they would refund what they could. Bearing in mind that these were non-refundable tickets @<hidden>£60 rtn, making a total of £90 of unused tickets, she got a refund of £44 on hers and £17 on his. Not bad considering.

I know Flybe come in for a great deal of stick sometimes, but they were very decent on this occasion.

If somebody has some time to spare he or she should look at airports flown by different Low cost guys, look at the tax rate and find that at some airports somebody pays different tax on the same routes.....

MOL said the other day that the fares are non-rufundable and that pax have to agree to the t&c's before purchasing the ticket, so therefore everybody is aware that no refunds will be made. When it was put to him that the fare is the fare covering transportation from A to B and that taxes and charges are just that, he still insisted that the fare included everything and no part of it was refundable.

So what happens to the tax? Well, when you've had enough no shows, and saved the cash, you can then go and buy another airline and tell your no shows to BUZZ off:D :D

I've been in the same situation several times, usually with the bigger carriers. On three occasions, BA have refunded the tax to my credit card as soon as I returned the tickets.

Now BMI used to do this, but since they moved down-market have stopped doing so. I challenged them on this practice, as I believed it was illegal for them to simply pocket the tax, but they get round it by imposing a fee for refunds. Yes, to refund the £28.10 tax, the fee was - you guessed - £28.10. So technically they are not keeping the tax, but are converting it to a 'refund fee'.

Perfectly legal - YES, as it's in the T's and C's of travel. A good way to treat customers - NO, I haven't travelled with them since. Simple.

If anyone is doing this through travel insurance companies who expect the airline to refund the tax, they should go back to the insurer when the airline refuses to pay, and the 'refund fee' should then also be collectable from the insurer.

Funnily enough, the one time I had an Easyjet ticket booked and didn't travel, I didn't even bother asking as I knew what the answer would be. To my surprise, two days later, a FULL REFUND :eek: hit the credit card - the WHOLE cost of the flight. Needless to say, I didn't query it. ;)