FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Cheapest Way to Get to Europe with 130,000 Amex MR points
Old Sep 18, 2013 | 11:46 am
  #9  
guv1976
FlyerTalk Evangelist
10 Countries Visited
Community Builder
All eyes on you!
20 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Not here; there!
Programs: AA Lifetime Gold
Posts: 34,814
Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

Originally Posted by Long Zhiren
Originally Posted by guv1976
Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

Flying into the U.K. is cheap; flying out of the U.K. is when you get hit with the U.K. APD, and the LHR PSC.
.
Flying through the UK is painfully expensive also.

I was just looking at booking a free saver business class ticket on BA using AAdvantage miles: DUS-LHR-DEN. $800+ in taxes! That's Eight Hundred. For DUS-ORD-DEN, it's $35 in taxes. Thirty-five. And I thought airfare taxes in the US were bad (higher than cigarettes and gasoline).
Nope. Flying through the U.K. is not expensive. Flying BA for a long-haul award flight is expensive. Unless AA is improperly charging you the U.K. APD on a mere connection through LHR, then the vast majority of those "taxes" are not taxes at all, but rather the surcharge for flying on BA metal. If you can find a TATL routing from LHR to DEN on AA metal, the fees will drop substantially.
guv1976 is offline