Rand$
28th Jul 2005, 13:47
Very interesting interview last night.
As pilots it doesnt involve us...but as passengers this makes me angry...
Chris Zweigenthal (Airline Association of SA), Glen Orsmond (1Time), Gidon Novik (Kulula), Stuart Cochrane (BA Comair)
Alec Hogg
Posted: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:00 | © Moneyweb Holdings Limited, 1997-2005
MONEYWEB: My colleague Dikatso Mametse has been investigating. Give us some background on the story, Dikatso.
DIKATSO MAMETSE: Basically what I did was just to compare prices between about four airlines, looking at ticket prices and just airport taxes. And what we found was there were varying differences between four. Kalula’s airport taxes came to about R100 for a return ticket, 1Time was about R42 each way, which comes to about R84. British Airways’ airport taxes come to R554, and South African Airways R394. Now, in terms of what the Airports Company of South Africa and the Airline Association of Southern Africa is saying, the most you should pay is about R52 per trip. Now this would include the R35 passenger service charge that goes to Acsa, R10 security charge, and a civil aviation authority safety charge of R7. Insurance charges and fuel levies are airline-specific and they are not compulsory charges.
MONEYWEB: All right, so we are being told that these are airline taxes, airport taxes, and you think, well, there’s not a whole lot you can do about them, so you cough up – and it’s over and above the ticket price?
DIKATSO MAMETSE: Yes.
MONEYWEB: Let’s bring in Chris Zweigenthal now, before we get to our studio guests, of whom we have three. Chris is the spokesperson for the for Airline Association of South Africa. Just to recap on what Dikatso had to say – which are compulsory taxes, compulsory charges, that all airlines have to levy to us?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: Alec, just to put this in perspective, there are only two taxes that are applicable. One is effectively your VAT charge that you pay on a ticket, and then there’s an air passenger tax, which is paid as part of an international ticket. These figures you are talking about are actually airport charges, so they are not classified as taxes. But you can just define two sets of charges. Firstly you’ve got fixed charges, which are these passenger service charges, and then variable charges, which Dikatso has talked about as being airline-specific. So if we look at purely domestic flights, you are talking about a figure of R52 for domestic flights, of all passenger service charges, which includes the payments to Airports Company as well as to ACS, which is a security charge, and then a safety charge of R7, which she has mentioned. So that’s R52. Those are the charges which are gazetted, and which each airline must pay per passenger that they carry to the various authorities.
MONEYWEB: Chris, are all of the airlines in South Africa members of your association?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: No, not all of them.
MONEYWEB: But is SAA a member?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: Yes, definitely.
MONEYWEB: I ask that, because SAA once again has said, no, they decline to comment on this issue. They’ve e-mailed us, but they won’t come on the air. If one has a look at your tickets, and certainly the way they’ve been marketed, you’ve been hit with an – quote, unquote – “airport tax”. Recently when we flew to Cape Town, I discussed it earlier, via SAA, we were hit with R600 airport taxes for the five of us, R3000 – and that’s what we were told, “airport tax”. So nobody complains, nobody bothers. But you’re telling me that the airport tax, as it should be, is only R52?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: No, what I know happens is obviously there is an insurance charge and the fuel levy, which is added to that. So when people looking at the figures in the “tax” bracket on your ticket, you’ve actually got to total that amount. And that’s where the numbers that you’re talking about are coming from.
MONEYWEB: But how can you let your members call it a tax?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: It’s not a tax, they don’t call it a tax. They’re calling it a charge.
MONEYWEB: Their employees are calling it a tax.
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: It’s an incorrect term. The only tax that can be levied is by government. So you’ve got the air passenger tax, which is the one that goes there. These are charges which are negotiated through discussions between our association board of airliner representatives, together with Acsa, and which are determined in conjunction with the economic regulator, who publishes them in a gazette.
MONEYWEB: Glen Orsmond, the chief executive from 1Time is back in the studio. Good to see that you and Gidon Novik from Kalula are smiling at each other – not as angry as you were last time, Glen.
GLEN ORSMOND: Nice to be here, thanks.
MONEYWEB: Why don’t you just bundle these charges, this R52 in, as part of the ticket?
GLEN ORSMOND: It’s exactly what we do, Alec. Since the launch of 1Time, we were the first airline to do that, to say our price has no hidden costs. If we advertise the price, it includes every imaginable tax or surcharge or anything along those lines. What these other airlines are doing, they are probably taking 70, 80% of this number that they call taxes and bringing it straight into revenue.
MONEYWEB: That’s exactly what David Shapiro and I were talking about earlier. It looks like just another way to bolster the profit margins, Dave?
GIDON NOVIK: Alec, just to jump in here, to take that claim, we were definitely the first to introduce all-inclusive pricing at Kalula, just to set that straight. We did that four years ago, we’ve never had fuel levies added on to our ticket. Never had an insurance surcharge. Not only that, but also car rental, because so many of our customers rent cars as well. The old car rental model was add this, add that, insurance surcharges, airport levies. We scrapped that, and we introduced car rental that for the first time had a fully inclusive rate which, interestingly enough, a lot of the car rental companies have followed as well.
MONEYWEB: In this issue, there’s no question that 1Time and Kalula are the good guys, but sandwiched in between the two of you is Stuart Cochrane, who is the executive manager for BA Comair, and, as Dikatso told us earlier, you guys came out really badly – R554 in airport tax as against R100 at Kalula and R84 at 1Time.
STUART COCHRANE: Alec, I think I would also like to reiterate what Chris said – there’s a very different scenario between an airport tax and a fuel levy, or a war tax – let’s move away from the word tax.
MONEYWEB: A war tax?
STUART COCHRANE: It basically came in globally as global airlines started applying an insurance charge post-September 11th, in terms of the insurance companies pushing up the premiums.
MONEYWEB: Why do you say no, Glen?
GLEN ORSMOND: That was straight after September 11th, that was in for six months and it got scrapped. The airlines introduced the levy and they conveniently just left it in. There’s no such thing as an insurance surcharge. There was a third party war risk that was valid for six months, and ended in 2001. The airlines have conveniently kept it in – something like the fuel levies they’re charging as well. The fuel levies, if you do the maths, it’s more than the whole fuel cost for the flight from Jo’burg to Cape Town. It’s not really a fuel surcharge for the whole oil price, as it pays the whole fuel cost.
MONEYWEB: On the fuel levy, and we will get back and give Stuart a chance to come back in a moment, what was interesting was the fuel tax from South African Airways – and they call it a fuel tax – was R100 domestic and R200 for any international flight. Now you can’t tell me that it costs you only twice as much in fuel to get to New York as it does to get from Durban to Johannesburg?
STUART COCHRANE: No, you are quite right. I think I heard earlier on before we came onto the show, we were talking about a tax and the fact that it should be a standard charge. That is a standard charge in terms of all sectors booked through domestic flights.
MONEYWEB: The R52?
GLEN ORSMOND: No, I’m talking about a fuel levy. That fuel levy would be a specific charge, and in our case it would be $20 per sector.
MONEYWEB: OK, let’s not get ourselves confused by the detail, but – a guy arrives at the airport, he thinks he’s paying R1200 for his ticket, but then he’s hit with another R554 in your case, with these additional levies and taxes and what have you. Why don’t you bundle that into the ticket?
STUART COCHRANE: No, I think what’s important is we’ve always been transparent with regard to the charges that are levied. We’ve never gone out and advertised a fare of R200 and then when somebody comes along, say “you must pay another R300”. I think what’s important is we try to keep that transparency. People are aware of what is going to be charged. We don’t have an above-the-line marketing campaign, driving low fares into the market.
MONEYWEB: But Stuart, you are charging more on these add-ons than your competitors are on the whole fare.
STUART COCHRANE: I think what needs to be taken into account in that example, that specific example, is that VAT is included off that fare. So the total package of – and I forget what the number was – VAT is bundled into that.
MONEYWEB: But if you look at it from a consumer’s perspective, that’s the ticket price, these are the airport taxes and whatever, which they think are obligatory. They cannot negotiate on that side – and this is where the problem comes in. Surely you should be bundling it all together and saying, “It’s going to cost you R2200 to get from Jo’burg to Cape Town on BA”.
STUART COCHRANE: I think we do bundle it. We give them a total fare at the end of the day. And if they are willing to pay that price …
MONEYWEB: But they think they’re paying R500 of that to government – that’s the perception that’s been created because of the way you’re going at it.
GIDON NOVIK: Alec, what’s important is what is advertised. And we’ve seen in certain airlines, you’ve mentioned their name earlier, they advertise a certain fare, you get all excited, you go onto the website, you make your booking, then right at the end you're slapped with R300 taxes or whatever. And even Glen, maybe on your site, you have R70 – where does the R70 taxes come from? You know, we must just get away from all of that. What people want is to keep it simple. They want to get on there, they want to see a price. If they see a price advertised in the newspaper or on an e-mail, they want to know that that’s the price they’ve got to pay. At kalula.com, that’s the price that you pay.
...and cents.
and the last bit....
(sorry about the length but it makes a really good point)
MONEYWEB: But isn’t there a case for the Advertising Standards Authority, Glen?
GLEN ORSMOND: Just a correction, there is no R70 on our website. That is correct, it’s false advertising. The idea is to bring someone in and hook him with false pricing. Pricing should be transparent. The price you advertise should be the price you pay. We’ve been saying that for a while. I’ve seen crazy situations where the price you pay is 100, 200% more than the price advertised. And that is ridiculous.
MONEYWEB: All right. So, at this point in time, what is concerning, I think, many people who are flying – and we’ve had an enormous amount of feedback on this article that Dikatso did yesterday – is it’s made as though it’s almost like you are paying government a certain amount of R500 in BA’s case, nearly R400 in SAA’s case. Are you going to do anything about fixing this perception?
STUART COCHRANE: I think what we need to understand, Alec, is globally this is the way the airline industry is structured. We’ve decided to package our fares in this regard.
MONEYWEB: But they’re structured like that because they’re in trouble, and they need to jack up their profits in whatever way they can. This is misleading, you’ve got to believe it’s misleading, Stuart?
STUART COCHRANE: Alec, when we need to up our fares, we’ve got so many different fare levels to change, it just makes it inflexible in terms of being able to. If we’ve got an increase in the fuel price, or an increase in the oil price, and we know that that fluctuates all the time, at least we are being transparent and saying, this is what we are charging you because this is where the fuel level is sitting at at the moment.
MONEYWEB: But your airplanes are full, they are choc-a-bloc, and you are charging a lot more than your competitors are to get to different places. Why do you need to put a fuel levy on top of it?
STUART COCHRANE: Because fuel is up by 40% year on year.
MONEYWEB: Sure. But that’s reflected already in your air fares.
STUART COCHRANE: No, it’s not. We haven’t seen an airfare increase in almost two years.
MONEYWEB: How come then, Glen Orsmond of 1Time, can one fly so much cheaper?
GLEN ORSMOND: Fuel was high a few years ago, fuel went to R3.50 a litre in South Africa for aviation. There were no fuel levies then. Fuel is now slightly lower, at R3.20, and now suddenly there are a whole lot of fuel levies that are more than enough to pay for the whole fuel bill. It\'s just false advertising.
MONEYWEB: Do you agree with that, Gidon? I know it is a stablemate of yours, BA, I guess in times like this, you wish they weren’t.
GIDON NOVIK: I think give credit to Stuart, they are not advertising that, and that’s an important point. If BA wants to construct their fares in a certain way, that’s fine. What’s important is that the message you go out to the consumer with is a clear, concise message, this is our price. When you go onto our website and you book it, this is what you\'re going to pay.
MONEYWEB: Thanks, Stuart Cochrane, for coming into the studio, particularly as he was under a bit of pressure tonight. It’s always good to have someone here with big goolies. We also thank Glen Orsmond and Gidon Novik for being a lot friendlier to each other than they were last time they were in the studio. And, David Shapiro, what do you make of all of this?
DAVID SHAPIRO: No, I’m waiting for the free ticket, “buy a free ticket”. In other words, we will give you a free ticket, but we’re just going to ask you to pay for the pilot’s salary, for the sandwich that you get, and for a parking meter at the airport. It\'s crazy. It’s time that you had one fee. This is a ticket, this is what it costs, this is what you pay.
MONEYWEB: Imtiaz, in every other business, they also have different input costs. Those aren’t stripped out?
IMTIAZ AHMED: And I think in addition, there must be transparency, and in most businesses there is transparency – except for the airline industry, where you struggle to understand what your end cost is going to be until you’re way down the road, Alec.
MONEYWEB: But the important thing here is that that extra that is being levied there, the R100 from Kalula, the R84 from 1Time, the R554 from BA and the R394 from SAA – it’s not a tax that’s going to improve your airport or your government or your roads. It’s not going to government, in fact it’s going into the coffers of those companies. Well, most of it, anyway.
..and cents
As pilots it doesnt involve us...but as passengers this makes me angry...
Chris Zweigenthal (Airline Association of SA), Glen Orsmond (1Time), Gidon Novik (Kulula), Stuart Cochrane (BA Comair)
Alec Hogg
Posted: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:00 | © Moneyweb Holdings Limited, 1997-2005
MONEYWEB: My colleague Dikatso Mametse has been investigating. Give us some background on the story, Dikatso.
DIKATSO MAMETSE: Basically what I did was just to compare prices between about four airlines, looking at ticket prices and just airport taxes. And what we found was there were varying differences between four. Kalula’s airport taxes came to about R100 for a return ticket, 1Time was about R42 each way, which comes to about R84. British Airways’ airport taxes come to R554, and South African Airways R394. Now, in terms of what the Airports Company of South Africa and the Airline Association of Southern Africa is saying, the most you should pay is about R52 per trip. Now this would include the R35 passenger service charge that goes to Acsa, R10 security charge, and a civil aviation authority safety charge of R7. Insurance charges and fuel levies are airline-specific and they are not compulsory charges.
MONEYWEB: All right, so we are being told that these are airline taxes, airport taxes, and you think, well, there’s not a whole lot you can do about them, so you cough up – and it’s over and above the ticket price?
DIKATSO MAMETSE: Yes.
MONEYWEB: Let’s bring in Chris Zweigenthal now, before we get to our studio guests, of whom we have three. Chris is the spokesperson for the for Airline Association of South Africa. Just to recap on what Dikatso had to say – which are compulsory taxes, compulsory charges, that all airlines have to levy to us?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: Alec, just to put this in perspective, there are only two taxes that are applicable. One is effectively your VAT charge that you pay on a ticket, and then there’s an air passenger tax, which is paid as part of an international ticket. These figures you are talking about are actually airport charges, so they are not classified as taxes. But you can just define two sets of charges. Firstly you’ve got fixed charges, which are these passenger service charges, and then variable charges, which Dikatso has talked about as being airline-specific. So if we look at purely domestic flights, you are talking about a figure of R52 for domestic flights, of all passenger service charges, which includes the payments to Airports Company as well as to ACS, which is a security charge, and then a safety charge of R7, which she has mentioned. So that’s R52. Those are the charges which are gazetted, and which each airline must pay per passenger that they carry to the various authorities.
MONEYWEB: Chris, are all of the airlines in South Africa members of your association?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: No, not all of them.
MONEYWEB: But is SAA a member?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: Yes, definitely.
MONEYWEB: I ask that, because SAA once again has said, no, they decline to comment on this issue. They’ve e-mailed us, but they won’t come on the air. If one has a look at your tickets, and certainly the way they’ve been marketed, you’ve been hit with an – quote, unquote – “airport tax”. Recently when we flew to Cape Town, I discussed it earlier, via SAA, we were hit with R600 airport taxes for the five of us, R3000 – and that’s what we were told, “airport tax”. So nobody complains, nobody bothers. But you’re telling me that the airport tax, as it should be, is only R52?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: No, what I know happens is obviously there is an insurance charge and the fuel levy, which is added to that. So when people looking at the figures in the “tax” bracket on your ticket, you’ve actually got to total that amount. And that’s where the numbers that you’re talking about are coming from.
MONEYWEB: But how can you let your members call it a tax?
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: It’s not a tax, they don’t call it a tax. They’re calling it a charge.
MONEYWEB: Their employees are calling it a tax.
CHRIS ZWEIGENTHAL: It’s an incorrect term. The only tax that can be levied is by government. So you’ve got the air passenger tax, which is the one that goes there. These are charges which are negotiated through discussions between our association board of airliner representatives, together with Acsa, and which are determined in conjunction with the economic regulator, who publishes them in a gazette.
MONEYWEB: Glen Orsmond, the chief executive from 1Time is back in the studio. Good to see that you and Gidon Novik from Kalula are smiling at each other – not as angry as you were last time, Glen.
GLEN ORSMOND: Nice to be here, thanks.
MONEYWEB: Why don’t you just bundle these charges, this R52 in, as part of the ticket?
GLEN ORSMOND: It’s exactly what we do, Alec. Since the launch of 1Time, we were the first airline to do that, to say our price has no hidden costs. If we advertise the price, it includes every imaginable tax or surcharge or anything along those lines. What these other airlines are doing, they are probably taking 70, 80% of this number that they call taxes and bringing it straight into revenue.
MONEYWEB: That’s exactly what David Shapiro and I were talking about earlier. It looks like just another way to bolster the profit margins, Dave?
GIDON NOVIK: Alec, just to jump in here, to take that claim, we were definitely the first to introduce all-inclusive pricing at Kalula, just to set that straight. We did that four years ago, we’ve never had fuel levies added on to our ticket. Never had an insurance surcharge. Not only that, but also car rental, because so many of our customers rent cars as well. The old car rental model was add this, add that, insurance surcharges, airport levies. We scrapped that, and we introduced car rental that for the first time had a fully inclusive rate which, interestingly enough, a lot of the car rental companies have followed as well.
MONEYWEB: In this issue, there’s no question that 1Time and Kalula are the good guys, but sandwiched in between the two of you is Stuart Cochrane, who is the executive manager for BA Comair, and, as Dikatso told us earlier, you guys came out really badly – R554 in airport tax as against R100 at Kalula and R84 at 1Time.
STUART COCHRANE: Alec, I think I would also like to reiterate what Chris said – there’s a very different scenario between an airport tax and a fuel levy, or a war tax – let’s move away from the word tax.
MONEYWEB: A war tax?
STUART COCHRANE: It basically came in globally as global airlines started applying an insurance charge post-September 11th, in terms of the insurance companies pushing up the premiums.
MONEYWEB: Why do you say no, Glen?
GLEN ORSMOND: That was straight after September 11th, that was in for six months and it got scrapped. The airlines introduced the levy and they conveniently just left it in. There’s no such thing as an insurance surcharge. There was a third party war risk that was valid for six months, and ended in 2001. The airlines have conveniently kept it in – something like the fuel levies they’re charging as well. The fuel levies, if you do the maths, it’s more than the whole fuel cost for the flight from Jo’burg to Cape Town. It’s not really a fuel surcharge for the whole oil price, as it pays the whole fuel cost.
MONEYWEB: On the fuel levy, and we will get back and give Stuart a chance to come back in a moment, what was interesting was the fuel tax from South African Airways – and they call it a fuel tax – was R100 domestic and R200 for any international flight. Now you can’t tell me that it costs you only twice as much in fuel to get to New York as it does to get from Durban to Johannesburg?
STUART COCHRANE: No, you are quite right. I think I heard earlier on before we came onto the show, we were talking about a tax and the fact that it should be a standard charge. That is a standard charge in terms of all sectors booked through domestic flights.
MONEYWEB: The R52?
GLEN ORSMOND: No, I’m talking about a fuel levy. That fuel levy would be a specific charge, and in our case it would be $20 per sector.
MONEYWEB: OK, let’s not get ourselves confused by the detail, but – a guy arrives at the airport, he thinks he’s paying R1200 for his ticket, but then he’s hit with another R554 in your case, with these additional levies and taxes and what have you. Why don’t you bundle that into the ticket?
STUART COCHRANE: No, I think what’s important is we’ve always been transparent with regard to the charges that are levied. We’ve never gone out and advertised a fare of R200 and then when somebody comes along, say “you must pay another R300”. I think what’s important is we try to keep that transparency. People are aware of what is going to be charged. We don’t have an above-the-line marketing campaign, driving low fares into the market.
MONEYWEB: But Stuart, you are charging more on these add-ons than your competitors are on the whole fare.
STUART COCHRANE: I think what needs to be taken into account in that example, that specific example, is that VAT is included off that fare. So the total package of – and I forget what the number was – VAT is bundled into that.
MONEYWEB: But if you look at it from a consumer’s perspective, that’s the ticket price, these are the airport taxes and whatever, which they think are obligatory. They cannot negotiate on that side – and this is where the problem comes in. Surely you should be bundling it all together and saying, “It’s going to cost you R2200 to get from Jo’burg to Cape Town on BA”.
STUART COCHRANE: I think we do bundle it. We give them a total fare at the end of the day. And if they are willing to pay that price …
MONEYWEB: But they think they’re paying R500 of that to government – that’s the perception that’s been created because of the way you’re going at it.
GIDON NOVIK: Alec, what’s important is what is advertised. And we’ve seen in certain airlines, you’ve mentioned their name earlier, they advertise a certain fare, you get all excited, you go onto the website, you make your booking, then right at the end you're slapped with R300 taxes or whatever. And even Glen, maybe on your site, you have R70 – where does the R70 taxes come from? You know, we must just get away from all of that. What people want is to keep it simple. They want to get on there, they want to see a price. If they see a price advertised in the newspaper or on an e-mail, they want to know that that’s the price they’ve got to pay. At kalula.com, that’s the price that you pay.
...and cents.
and the last bit....
(sorry about the length but it makes a really good point)
MONEYWEB: But isn’t there a case for the Advertising Standards Authority, Glen?
GLEN ORSMOND: Just a correction, there is no R70 on our website. That is correct, it’s false advertising. The idea is to bring someone in and hook him with false pricing. Pricing should be transparent. The price you advertise should be the price you pay. We’ve been saying that for a while. I’ve seen crazy situations where the price you pay is 100, 200% more than the price advertised. And that is ridiculous.
MONEYWEB: All right. So, at this point in time, what is concerning, I think, many people who are flying – and we’ve had an enormous amount of feedback on this article that Dikatso did yesterday – is it’s made as though it’s almost like you are paying government a certain amount of R500 in BA’s case, nearly R400 in SAA’s case. Are you going to do anything about fixing this perception?
STUART COCHRANE: I think what we need to understand, Alec, is globally this is the way the airline industry is structured. We’ve decided to package our fares in this regard.
MONEYWEB: But they’re structured like that because they’re in trouble, and they need to jack up their profits in whatever way they can. This is misleading, you’ve got to believe it’s misleading, Stuart?
STUART COCHRANE: Alec, when we need to up our fares, we’ve got so many different fare levels to change, it just makes it inflexible in terms of being able to. If we’ve got an increase in the fuel price, or an increase in the oil price, and we know that that fluctuates all the time, at least we are being transparent and saying, this is what we are charging you because this is where the fuel level is sitting at at the moment.
MONEYWEB: But your airplanes are full, they are choc-a-bloc, and you are charging a lot more than your competitors are to get to different places. Why do you need to put a fuel levy on top of it?
STUART COCHRANE: Because fuel is up by 40% year on year.
MONEYWEB: Sure. But that’s reflected already in your air fares.
STUART COCHRANE: No, it’s not. We haven’t seen an airfare increase in almost two years.
MONEYWEB: How come then, Glen Orsmond of 1Time, can one fly so much cheaper?
GLEN ORSMOND: Fuel was high a few years ago, fuel went to R3.50 a litre in South Africa for aviation. There were no fuel levies then. Fuel is now slightly lower, at R3.20, and now suddenly there are a whole lot of fuel levies that are more than enough to pay for the whole fuel bill. It\'s just false advertising.
MONEYWEB: Do you agree with that, Gidon? I know it is a stablemate of yours, BA, I guess in times like this, you wish they weren’t.
GIDON NOVIK: I think give credit to Stuart, they are not advertising that, and that’s an important point. If BA wants to construct their fares in a certain way, that’s fine. What’s important is that the message you go out to the consumer with is a clear, concise message, this is our price. When you go onto our website and you book it, this is what you\'re going to pay.
MONEYWEB: Thanks, Stuart Cochrane, for coming into the studio, particularly as he was under a bit of pressure tonight. It’s always good to have someone here with big goolies. We also thank Glen Orsmond and Gidon Novik for being a lot friendlier to each other than they were last time they were in the studio. And, David Shapiro, what do you make of all of this?
DAVID SHAPIRO: No, I’m waiting for the free ticket, “buy a free ticket”. In other words, we will give you a free ticket, but we’re just going to ask you to pay for the pilot’s salary, for the sandwich that you get, and for a parking meter at the airport. It\'s crazy. It’s time that you had one fee. This is a ticket, this is what it costs, this is what you pay.
MONEYWEB: Imtiaz, in every other business, they also have different input costs. Those aren’t stripped out?
IMTIAZ AHMED: And I think in addition, there must be transparency, and in most businesses there is transparency – except for the airline industry, where you struggle to understand what your end cost is going to be until you’re way down the road, Alec.
MONEYWEB: But the important thing here is that that extra that is being levied there, the R100 from Kalula, the R84 from 1Time, the R554 from BA and the R394 from SAA – it’s not a tax that’s going to improve your airport or your government or your roads. It’s not going to government, in fact it’s going into the coffers of those companies. Well, most of it, anyway.
..and cents