GBOAC

The article/Greenpeace campaign is flawed as it does not distinguish between work and personal travel - one of which is my employers carbon emissions, the other is mine. How would this be separated out in such a tax? Does this '15%' figure include those who fly for work, or just for leisure/personal travel? If it includes both, what does it say about the salaries of those who have to travel regularly for work?

Yes maybe B2B runs for tier points should be banned/penalised, in which case there should be a means of paying for tier points instead of flying (maybe cost of ticket minus taxes and fuel surcharge? – but maybe with the ability to spend an afternoon in the lounge at Heathrow :-p). This IS a flaw in the system that should be fixed. I would actually rather do this in cases where I am a few TP short, and maybe BA would be well placed to offer this for, say, the last 10% of tier thresholds.

Maybe also awarding points/miles on end-to-end distance and not routing would also help disincentivise unnecessary flights, but I sense the numbers who go out of their way to fly longer routes to earn status are probably very low (less than 1%)

Other potential changes – ban or tax domestic or local international flights (e.g. within UK and France-Benelux-Germany, all places where there are decent rail alternatives. How about twinning frequent flyer with frequent rail schemes – so you can earn/spent points across say UK airlines and Eurostar – I certainly WOULD use Eurostar to EU if I could pool my loyalty and status. At present there IS an incentive for me to fly to Europe given that most of my travel is non-EU (I get treated better by BA than I would do as an unknown on Eurostar). Working and innovating within the system is a better approach than overturning it imho (and not just here, but proven in so many instances and sectors).

How about taxing flights and tickets based on seat-mile emissions of an aircraft, effectively incentivising airlines to invest in cleaner fleets AND passengers to fly based on lower emissions? But it all starts getting very complex very quickly (e.g. who pays for an change in equipment type?).

However in reality the only change I can see airlines doing voluntarily will be a move towards a more spend-based system, which will further benefit the richest and those that fly in the most 'polluting' seats.

Banning Frequent Flyer programmes would, for the most part, make frequent travel (and all the physical drain it poses) harder, without making it happen less. This would result in increased stress which would then have other knock on impacts in society.

azepine00

A more pragmatic approach would be to discourage businesses from unnecessary travel (most large companies managed that over the last year without collapsing so it is doable) and to encourage airlines to change pricing strategies (eg change nonsense like connections being cheaper than nonstops, transcons cheaper than 300 mi hops etc).. that and of course developing more reduced emission transportation methods in general..

Globaliser

These are not "nonsense". They exist because air fares have largely been deregulated, and so prices are largely set by market forces, ie supply and demand linked to what the market perceives to be more or less valuable.

If you don't like these effects of a free market, the answer is probably pretty simple: re-regulate air fares. Setting a single cents-per-mile rate for all air travel would probably do the job.

:D!

If FFPs were banned in the UK only, that might incentivise me to take a short-haul flight to mainland Europe and then do a long-haul from there, as I would still earn miles on the flight not touching the UK (I could register with a non-UK address if UK accounts were not allowed). Obviously the decision for each individual trip would depend on the overall price and logistics as well as the FFP.

Sheikh Yerbooty

Absolutely. In the not too distant future I'm attending a dinner in London. BA offered the best itinerary at roughly the same price as the competitor and T5 is more conveniently located. I have status with the competitor and not even a member of BAEC and, frankly, couldn't care less. I do have a QR membership stashed away somewhere, but didn't even bother registering it for this flight.

Outside of the US you can be a gold-plated super-duper double-executive yada yada member, and even with empty seats up front you will as good as never get an upgrade, unless your class of travel is overbooked. I don't give a frack about lounge access; I time my arrival at the airport to walk straight through and onboard the aircraft so have zero time for lounges anyway. If I'm on a long-haul with a layover it's business class, so that's lounge access sorted. So what's the point of collecting those miles and staying loyal? Accruing miles to be redeemed against purchase of flight tickets you say? Well, sure, but in my own time I have a policy against stepping on board flights with a duration of more than 4 hours, and for flights that short the value of miles is minuscule compare to just paying your way. Example: Using miles flying to PMI or SZG = 20K miles and 200 EUR in taxes. Using money = 300 EUR, including taxes.

So I've stopped giving a shyte about being loyal to an airline or FFP, and solely go for the itinerary which suits me best - within the confines of the company travel policy of course.

LondonElite

Serious? Oh, you were not able to board first or have a glass of champagne in the lounge before your flight; I can see how you might have long term hypertension.

I think this might be taking it a bit far!

Often1

1. If this happens in the UK, a good bet that other European nations will do so as well.

2. The simple answer, whether good or bad policy, is to tax miles earned at the time they are issued. Establish a rough value per mile/point and charge off against a credit card monthly. Those who do not want to pay the tax simply do not enter their BAEC # on their tickets (or do not open an account in the first place). Nobody to chase down and no worries about who paid for the ticket. If you, the passenger, choose to accept the benefit, you are charged a tax roughly on the spot.

Bohinjska Bistrica

What utter rubbish this is. You might as well argue that a delivery driver takes an unfair share of road journeys.

​​​​​​And of corse frequent fliers are already taxed more given the amount of APD paid.

GordonMacPherson

exactly.

the greenpeace offices in asia ususally has AC run down to 18C. totally adding to the carbon footprint.

OTOH, most flyertalkers outside of their core business travels (LHR-JFK in full J which will happen with or without FFP) only take up the slack of empty seats (awards seats and low yield seats for good TP) - and even exEU flights, by business economics they only exist because of the slack in the system (say, alitalia have too much slack hence BA needs to match exITA fares).

perhaps they should target school holidays - those are the flight-seats that the world can do without... except for the bars in the med islands and the SE Asian farmers.

jerry a. laska

Some comments in a somewhat similar thread from a couple of years ago:
Q? If FFP's like BAEC didn't exist, would you fly BA

cauchy

A bit old, but it seems we have the highest air passenger taxes worldwide.

https://airlinesuk.org/flying-high-h...senger-duty-2/

But it's not clear how much of that tax is borne by the airlines (in the form of reduced profit) or passengers (in the form of higher fares). For example, if we compare midsize markets in the form of MAN-JFK and DUB-JFK, the fares in economy are roughly the same, which suggests the airlines are paying the tax, but there are obviously differences between the Manchester and Dublin markets.

I think the airline industry could do without this right now.

GBOAC

I'm actually not (just) referring to the lounge, but yes priority boarding (having your hand luggage close at hand, priority baggage (less time waiting at the other end), fast track security, priority help when things go wrong (which they do more often if you fly frequently), all adds up in terms of stressfull elements and hours of the course of multiple flights

tuonopepper

Yes, however where as I may take a Slightly less convenient option with BA (ie. Via LHR) to bag some points/benefit from status as things stand, that incentive would be gone so those flights with BA would be too.

tuonopepper

Yes, however where as I may take a Slightly less convenient option with BA (ie. Via LHR) to bag some points/benefit from status as things stand, that incentive would be gone so those flights with BA would be too.

roberino

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