Two big motivations for fuel surcharges:
1) Avoiding the 7.5% excise tax - more money for them.
2) Easier/faster to change when fuel prices are volatile. Just update one YQ charge rather than refiling thousands of fares per city pair. I believe there's a GDS capacity issue here the makes the latter untenable.
There's no marketing advantage since the fare search engines will all include the taxes and fees from the start, and the new DOT advertising rules require the fuel surcharge to be included.
Originally Posted by
SEA1K4EVR
I agree.. I see no benefit yet they still do it. You can't even get the full fare including surcharges on ExpertFlyer.. the airlines lobbied the govt to allow them to continue to publish fares without taxes/YQ to 3rd parties.
Sounds like an ExpertFlyer issue... ITA Software has no problem displaying the all-in fare from the beginning.