Originally Posted by
jerseytom
The question is - how much global air travel is from FF-related activity? Redeeming reward flights, mileage runs, etc. On any given flight, how many seats are filled by people doing those things? Is that data included in the report? I'd guess it's not much, but maybe I'm wrong. Like are we actually going for the biggest hitters in carbon emissions or is this all for show?
I think the question is a broader one of both induced travel (at the extreme is mileage runs, but low-fee award tickets are another item here) or incrementally induced travel (e.g. awkward routing chosen due to FFP benefits) as well as diverted travel (e.g. "Passenger would have taken the Eurostar instead of flying to Paris/Brussels").
One thing that strikes me about the plan that is half-cocked: I suspect that most of the higher-end travelers aren't "us", they're businessmen (and women) being sent around by work. If you throw an individual tax at them, there's a good case that you've picked the wrong target (and/or you're going to watch some stupid games of travel load being shuffled around more). At the highest level, the response will be "cash or card?" and it will simply be absorbed as part of the "cost of doing business" (albeit with some complications depending on how taxes interact) whereas at lower levels you're just going to be socking it to folks who don't necessarily have much choice in the matter. I can just imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who never buys their own tickets (100% business travel) to be hit with a tax bill at the end of the year and (presumably) not permitted to send it "up the chain".
In Europe, I think there's a plausible case for knocking out a large share of the shorter-haul flights. NB I'm not talking about cases like the Isle of Man, Jersey, or the Scottish islands (cases which I think deserve waivers, especially in cases where ferries run into significant issues). I
am talking about some feeder routes where there's a decent rail connection (e.g. Lyon-Paris) and where a decent amount of the traffic is O/D on that pair (rather than feeding into longer-distance flights).
FWIW, any significant push on air travel is going to cause a certain amount of chaos in the field. I guess that's why I'm looking at this and just saying, in my mind, "phase in decent seat size minimums, restrict deep discounting, and let everything else sort itself out" and, if that doesn't cut it, perhaps chuck an additional tax on the airline side and let
them figure out how to pass it through (with the requirement to do so as part of the base fare).
If the government wants to go down this road, one other thing that I think might be worth targeting would be adding pressure against airports having large amounts of (overpriced) retail (so they can't cross-subsidize operations with them).
Basically, take a machine gun to ancillary income on all fronts and I think there's a good chance you'd achieve a lot of the stated desired policy end-goals without nearly the mess that trying to administer a tax like this would impose [1].
[1] Because, as I noted elsewhere, there's every chance that you find
plenty of compliance issues with taxing individual travel.