Originally Posted by u2fan
The airlines lobbied hard several months ago to be allowed to include the fuel surcharge as a tax. The benefit to them was when the advertise a fare, they do not have to include this 'tax' in their ad making the fare look much cheaper. It now falls under the much more vague 'plus taxes'.
Yeah, I remember. There was a thread about it on FT. The consensus was that the idea was silly, but --as people that care way too much about airplanes-- we could deal with it (i.e. tack on an extra $300 to whatever's advertised in
USA Today).
The problem is that there are surely people out there, for whom $800 is under budget, but $1100 is not. And, it's possible that such deceptive practices suck this crowd in.
UA's (as well as AA, NW, CO, DL, etc) position is that foreign carriers do it so they should be able to do it as well. While this makes sense, I think the more consumer friendly approach would be to put an end to the practice altogether on US soil (I believe the government has the power to do so).
The really contraversial aspect of fuel surcharges pertains to award tickets. There is an interesting thread on the AC forum about this because Aeroplan has made some bold moves with respect to such.