Why Do Airlines Have Varied Taxes & Fees

[afterdark]

if they operate similar domestic flights how can taxes be different?

ie
Bmi £21.80
Bmi Baby £15.00
British Airways £21.70
Easyjet £5.00
Flyglobespan £14.90
Ryanair £15.85

[WHBM]

Why ?

Because they lie to get the "headline" price in advertising or page 1 of their website down as low as possible and then add in extras to increase their revenue, pretending they are taxes imposed from outside.

http://gpsinformation.us/main/paint.txt

In any reasonable administration the regulators (read CAA) would have stamped this out long ago. But as the latter are too busy lining up OBEs for each other it seems to not happen.

[brabazon]

The Air Transport Users Council did a report into this:

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/306/AUC%20report%20on%20taxes,%20fees%20and%20charges.pdf

As WHBM says, the airlines like to show low "fares" and then add on extras as "taxes and charges".

Some of these are passed directly on (e.g Air Passenger Duty) but it is not clear how much of the "Airport Charges" are passed on to the relevant airports and how much goes to the profit of the airlines.

Before people say "well the costs are much lower than in the past" that's true, but then lets have a level field in terms of what constitutes "taxes and charges".

[WHBM]

The report has described the situation well and says it is both grossly unsatisfactory and getting worse. What has been the action of the CAA as a result of it ? Nothing !

[brabazon]

Since European liberalisation the economic regulation role of the CAA has diminished and I'm not sure if it has any legal powers over such practices. I guess it's now a trading/advertising standards issue.

[unwiseowl]

Why do different airlines charge different amouts of tax? Also, is there any way of veryifying what the taxes should be? Do airports publish the figures?

[brabazon]

Why? Because they can. Airports do publish charges - see their websites or if you can get hold of it, the IATA Airport and Air Navigation Charges Manual, (http://www.iata.org/ps/publications/aancm.htm) though these are their published prices and they can and do deals! Government duties should be clear, the UK's is the Air Passenger Duty see here for details:

http://www.hmce.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageExcise_InfoGuides&columns=1&id=AIRPASSENGERDUTY

[isa kite]

The only airline tax is APD, (the fixed £5 or £10). All other "taxes" are simply the airlines costs being passed on as a separate item to make it look as if it's someone elses fault. Airport landing fees are the common reason given, and these can vary, but there might as well be a line on the ticket for staff costs, or fuel.

[Taff_flyer]

In the UK, advertising is governed by the ASA and thier rules clearly state that airlines must advertise fares that are fully inclusive of all taxes, fees and charges. The only difference to this is on the web where airlines can show fares that exclude tax. If they do show base fares they must make it clear in the ad that they are exclusive rather than inclusive fares.

Whilst airlines can choose to advertise fares online that exclude TFC's if you take a look at most UK airline web site banner ads they do show fully inclusive fares. There are one or two airlines that don't.

The most important thing to the customer is that, from the very beginning, they are shown and enticed to book based on the final amount they are going to pay and the AUC article doesn't really talk about that which is a shame.

[jabird]

A level playing field would be "nice", but how far should this be taken?

If people are shopping around, they would also want to know how much it will cost to either get to the airport by bus / train, or to park.

Many people's eyes still glaze over at the prospect of a £1+tax airline ticket. They are still getting a really good deal compared to how prices were before, and in my experience, there usually are at least some seats available at these lower prices.

Has anyone tried booking an advanced purchase Virgin train ticket recently? At least there are no "hidden extras", apart from all that buffet food when the usual signal problems crop up, but I regularly find that even though there is no availability on the advance tickets, the trains are still barely 1/3 full. Somone needs to teach Mr Green a little more about yield management! Surely the bearded one has enough experience from Virgin Blue to pass this on to his train team?

The party will start to wind down from May 6th, as the government are looking at introducing some form of environmental charging in their third term, which is hardly surprising considering that iirc, APD is the only tax to have actually come down under this government!

If the charging regime was also to include increased fees for night flights, or lower charges for "greener" aircraft, then we will get into a real minefield, especially as these charges might come from the government, or be levied by the airport themselves, with some passed on to a community fund.

So if you are confused now, get ready for a very sore head when trying to book flights in five years' time.

And as for the small business user claiming flights on expenses - APD might be the only tax for now, but it is not VAT, so Gordon keeps the lot, and none of it goes to any kind of environmental projects. I presume that is one reason why we have APD, rather than VAT on (at least domestic) flights?

[Jordan D]

If that's not odd, then why does Easyjet change the amount of taxes/charges you pay when you book your flight at a different time.

Jordan

[PAXboy]

All well said. When trying to book my regular LTN-IOM to see my mother, I followed the BA website link to see the detail of the costs and charges and was presented merely with a written statement about what they contained, rather than a financial statement as to how it was concocted.

Since they have a monopoly on the route - I booked! Our best hope will be for Consumers Association (Which?) to bring this to folk's attention.

[Hartington]

Each airport sets it's own charges. Some charge inbound passengers, others outbound. Charges vary by all sorts of criteria; number of seats, empty weight, destination, domestic vs international, time of day, day of the week etc. Then an airline comes along and negotiates and gets a discount (and whatever else you may think about them Ryanair seem to be successful at doing that). The net result is that two apparently similar routes (e.g. LHR/GLA and LGW/EDI) operated by the same airline can have significantly different tax rates and different airlines operating an identical route between the same airports can also have different tax rates.