Originally Posted by stut
It can also be interesting to compare their taxes and charges between paid flights and award flights.
Yep, taxes have become dear to KLM FT-ers hearts, because you pay more in tax for an award ticket than you would if you bought a ticket on the same flight.. they have also been caught miscalculating taxes on a few occasions, just to add to confidence in their abilities. Strangely, the miscalculations don't appear to have been in the passengers favour
AMS is also quite an expensive airport to fly through, because in addition to the PSC, the Netherlands air duty, there is also a noise tax (if I whisper, can i be exempt?
)
Back to the original question. We have discussed this quite a lot on the KLM board. The non-LCCs tend to put a lot of extra charges into their taxes (including airline ones
). The LCC's tend to include these in ticket price. Also, we know at some airports, some of the LCC's have negotiated discounts of the PSC due at some airports, but will not want their competitors (and no doubt the airport will not want other airlines) to know exactly what rate the are paying. Hence, it's very rare to find a PSC included in the taxes and charges of a LCC, as then they would have to provide this information.