The wonderful world of airline taxes

How many times have you seen a great airfare advertised online or in the newspaper only to call up the travel agent or go to the website and, after a lot of talk or fussing with the webpage, you finally realize that with the taxes and the surcharges and the fees, it actually works out to a whole lot more than you could ever imagine paying for an airplane ticket?

If the situation sounds familiar, you are not alone. The Air Transport Users Council (AUC) recently conducted research which confirms what many travelers have long felt: it is almost impossible for the average consumer to negotiate the strange world of airline taxes.

In particular the recent AUC study compared the advertised fares and hidden fees of low-cost carriers with regular scheduled flights. They found that airlines such as British Airways, bmi, Air Southwest and Virgin often include all taxes, fees and charges (TFCs) in their advertisements and booking process. On the other hand, many of the budget airlines advertise prices without the TFCs.

If consumers knew exactly how much the extras were, they could still make a reasonably informed choice about which is the better priced ticket, but each airline charges a different amount in TFCs, making it hard to know from an advertisement exactly how much the ticket really will be.

EasyJet, for example, added £22 extra to the price of a one way ticket between Stansted and Alicante whereas Ryanair charged £38.93 in TFCs for the same route. In another case, bmibaby added £37.90 extra in TFCs for a flight between Birmingham and Aberdeen but Flybe added a whopping £51.30

The different fee schedule between different airlines is something that AUC found most people unaware of. Of all the people who buy airline tickets online that they surveyed, 43% had no idea that TFCs weren’t standard.

The report came to the conclusion that, “There remains a risk that passengers are not aware that airlines charge different TFCs on a route and therefore might not look at other airlines’ websites to compare fares.” As a result the organization is pushing for all airlines to include all taxes, fees and charges in their advertised fares. Otherwise, there’s almost no way for the average consumer to reasonably compare flights without wasting a lot of time.

www.ryanair.com