DL gouges European air travellers on ''taxes''

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

What I have found recently on Delta:
- round trip ticket TO Europe from the US and back: taxes about $100
- round trip ticket between same city pairs FROM Europe to US and back: taxes over $300.
- for comparision, same city pairs from Europe to US and back on NW: taxes around $100

I have found this on both award and paid tickets. When I asked a DL phone rep about what those extra taxes were, she was vague and said she couldn't tell exactly, but it wasn't a fuel surcharge.

When I first encountered this, DL wanted $332 in taxes and fees on an award ticket from Bucharest back to the states this summer. I then checked with NW and they found me an award ticket back to the states from Bucharest but with taxes of only $81 plus a phone ticket fee of $15. That is a huge difference, and of course I told DL what they could do with their ticket.

I have since checked schedules on paid tickets for upcoming business travel back from Budapest in March to the states, and again DL wanted over $300 for taxes and fees and NW wanted around $100. Needless to say I have alerted my employer's travel office of this scam as we have a lot of travel originating overseas.

DL is both devaluing Skymiles and gouging paying customers. I'm glad I switched to NW as my preferred carrier serveral years ago, and only have about 130K Skymiles still to burn. Who knows if they will extend the same ''tax'' to flyers originating in the US.

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

Bad news for US-based DL flyers

As a result of some discussion on Flyertalk, I got on Skype tonight (at least it is night in my time zone!) and called DL to ask some questions. After a lot of runaround, and false explanations of what this extra $200 or so was, I finally got passed to the revenue desk, who told me that this was a ''Delta surcharge'' that was not a tax or anything paid to another airline and as to exactly what it was for said ''I don't have a reasonable explanation''. She said it was imposed a couple of weeks ago in selected markets in Europe on tickets to the US, but that it would soon be expanded to all of Europe and would be including tickets originating in the US. Further, she said it would eventually be expanded to ''all travel areas''.

Since this ''Delta surcharge'' is listed among ''taxes and fees'' it means an additional charge SkyMiles members will have to pay in order to use their miles, thus greatly devaluing SkyMiles.