Crazy airline fuel surcharges

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

I was just booking a ticket for my wife one way from London to Brussels, and ran across something really weird. With no LCC's on that route, I was looking at only legacy carriers. I looked at BMI first, and they wanted GBP 132, of which GBP 68 was ''taxes and fees''. i could also have used 4500 miles from my BMI Diamond Club ff account for this ticket but would have had to pay the ''taxes and fees''. Then I checked BA, and the total price of thier ticket was was GBP 67.30, which is 70 pence less than just tax and fees with BMI. That is a no brainer. Buying a ticket with BA was cheaper than using miles at BMI. Looking in more detail, I found that the big culprit was that the ''fuel surcharge'' was 2.5 times higher at BMI than at BA. What? It takes two and a half times as much fuel to fly BMI's planes than BA's????? That just shows what a consumer ripoff airline fuel surcharges are. They have nothing to do with what fuel actually costs and are set at whatever amount an airline wants to charge. They treat them as ''taxes'' for purposes of charging you on an award ticket, but if you read the fine print they treat them as part of the fare (which they are in reality) if you have a paid ticket you cancel. Part of the problem is that since Lufthansa took over BMI, things like fuel surcharges have gone up. This is likely a problem at any Lufthansa controlled airline including Austrian and Swiss.

Of course, the fuel surcharge problem these days as it applies to award tickets is generally confined to European legacy airlines, but it is creeping into US airlines gradually. DL imposes it as a ''foreign origin surcharge'' for itineraries origining outside the US, and AA imposes in on segments that have a BA code.