Why is the airline fuel fee a tax?

score:5

Accepted answer

Service providers like to deceive their customers by either showing them a lower price up until the person commits to the deal (currently illegal in the EU and in many other countries) or by pretending as if their own profits are actually smaller than they really are - Airbnb is one good example as they only show you half of the fee they end up charging. In your particular case the airline does its dirty trick by using a 'fuel surcharge' which dramatically lowers the perceived amount earned by the company.

But you as the consumer should not care about the fee structure at all. All that matters is the final price, everything else is superficial. To quote an article about the fuel surcharge:

"What goes into that [fee] for customers doesn't really matter because the competition happens at the cost-of-the-ticket level," Freed added. "It's really a non-issue for customers because there's various competition on what a ticket costs to go anywhere."

Upvote:4

There are few points which may be relevant:

  • in most cases the language has been changed to “taxes and surcharges” or “taxes and fees” to better reflect these various components. Some sites / channels may not have been updated.

  • since the advertised price usually includes these taxes and surcharges, they are in most cases not relevant for the passenger. They are mostly a way for airlines to tell people “hey look, you can see here that a lot of the cost is not our fault, we’re just passing along things we have no control on”...

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