Foreign Perspectives

Airline charges are such a ripoff these days, aren’t they?

I’ve just booked a flight where the flight charge was EUR 3 yet the plane ticket actually cost EUR 24 courtesy of the basic charges. And that’s not even including the EUR 9 that the checked luggage is charged!

OK, I can accept that taxes are the bulk of that and in some ways it’s good to see it separated out. The snag is, of course, that the airlines get blamed for the tax charges rather than the government who see it as an easy way to collect money and appear environmentally friendly at the same time.

But what about the EUR 6 “processing fee”? How come that’s a separate charge from the ticket itself? After all, presumably they wouldn’t let you fly if they’d not “processed” you, would they? How come, for that matter, it costs EUR 6 per person when the passenger is the person typing up all the information?

Of course in some ways we’re all to blame for this business of separating out of the charges. Psychologically, we’d rather see a headline price of EUR 3 than the real charge of EUR 30. It is incredibly misleading though.