Flight taxes - how do they work?

eyesy

Hi

I just booked a flight with BMI using my diamond card points to get a free flight excluding taxes. The flight ended up being with Lufthansa, a partner airline of BMI.

The taxes turned out being £75.10 per person. I checked on the Lufthansa website and for the EXACT same flights, the taxes are only £63 per person. I asked BMI (well, their call centre...) and they just told me that depending on how you book the flight e.g. redemption, the taxes are different, even if it's for exactly the same flight.

But I thought that the taxes are set by the government for things like environmental tax, airport duties, security etc. - why should it be over 15% higher taxes just because I'm getting a flight using air miles instead of paying for it? Or is this just a sneaky (and illegal?) way of BMI to make money?

Advice much appreciated.

alanrowell

There's only one tax imposed by the Government - and that's Air Passenger Duty - which varies between £10 & £80 depending on flight route & class of travel. For a given route/class it's a fixed cost

EVERYTHING else is what used to be part of the normal ticket price but is now separated out so that they can show low headline prices & make people like you pay a lot of money for "free" flights

As to why the CHARGES are different - it's all down to the deals that BMI / Lufthansa have made with the airports / fuel companies / catering services.

blindman

eyesy wrote:

Hi

I just booked a flight with BMI using my diamond card points to get a free flight excluding taxes. The flight ended up being with Lufthansa, a partner airline of BMI.

The taxes turned out being £75.10 per person. I checked on the Lufthansa website and for the EXACT same flights, the taxes are only £63 per person. I asked BMI (well, their call centre...) and they just told me that depending on how you book the flight e.g. redemption, the taxes are different, even if it's for exactly the same flight.

But I thought that the taxes are set by the government for things like environmental tax, airport duties, security etc. - why should it be over 15% higher taxes just because I'm getting a flight using air miles instead of paying for it? Or is this just a sneaky (and illegal?) way of BMI to make money?

Advice much appreciated.

Have a good look at this thread on Flyertalk.

The first sticky is the best to start with then browse some of the threads to get more info.

The taxes seem to be a random number TBH with AA beatin others hands down e.g.

BMI to US return £150 taxes
AA to US return £76 taxes

djtezz

i got a email saying ours has gone upto 40 flying with us airways so does this mean its 20 per person?