Taxes/fees/surcharges - their recalculation when changing free-to-change BA bookings
 

My noble peers,

I, among others, recently took advantage of the hoo-ha-woop-woop that was the recent 50% off redemption sale. My itinerary, if typed, looks exactly like this -

MAN-LHR-CPT-LHR-STOP-JNB-LHR-MAN

with all international segments booked in BA's rather retro First Class cabin.

Taxes for said journey amounted to a rather whopping, though rather expected, £742.90.

I have since changed the dates of my first three sectors once, and the date of my third sector once. Each times taxes/fees/surcharges have been recalculated to the tune of approx £80 a pop. How very rude. And this is with the offline fee waived, apparently.

This has never happened to me on any previous redemption booking, or any other booking for that matter, and I’m a serious, serial date/time changer. Do these recalculations seem excessive to the group? Has anyone in our midst had similar experiences? And when just changing dates?


djb25

Is £742 the total taxes and fees now or originally?

The recalculations do sound a bit strange, but I can tell you that the taxes and fees for my LHR-CPT-LHR in CW were £387.80 and that going via JNB would have been precisely the same. Doubling that gives a bit more than your figure, even not allowing for the fact that F fees are sometimes (not always) more than CW fees, and not adding on anything extra for the MAN bits. In other words, £742 sounds a bit on the low side if anything.

Not relevant to your question, but how long did it take them to do the recalculations? They sat on mine (which turned out to be zero, but that was still during the sale period) five days before the intervention of Nicci who got it done in less than five hours.

Thanks LeisureFirst. Have you yourself ever been subject to such a 'recalculation'?

There were the original taxes etc calculated by BA.COM. The total now seems to be over £910.


Both times the Executive Club agent calculated the new charges as I waited.

Hold on, you're going Machester - London-Capetown-London and then down to Joburg and back. So two round trips?

So double the fees, makes sense as it appears as two tickets.

Now what are the new dates are you travelling? Are they after 1 Nov 2009 when Alistar Darling screws us all welll and truly?

The new dates are all over the festive period this year, just as they were in the original booking. Next year's dates to JNB have not changed, though the return segment does occur after 1 November 2009.

I realise that it is now incumbant on BA to pay the increased APD for the JNB-LHR and LHR-MAN segments after 1st November 2009. An airline can choose to pass on the APD to the passenger if they wish but, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought BA had a history of not doing this. Either way, this new APD, as far as I can work out from http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/pbr2008/pbrn20.pdf, is just £20 extra for JNB-LHR and a massive £1 extra for LHR-MAN.

How BA have arrived at c.£160 extra taxes/fees etc is still no clearer.

There is also an exchange rate issue which I have been caught out on before.

If the ticket is changed before the 1st leg is flown the whole fare has to be recalculated and if there are any sectors in it which are priced other than in GBP or which include overseas taxes, they would have the exchange rate at the time of re-booking applied. Also if the base fare of any sectors has increased, that increase would also apply.

It may be that to the untutored CS agents these increases appear as taxes / charges of a misc nature.

I know that when this happened to me an ex EUR that I re-booked after a previous fall in the value of the GBP, the CS agent could not explain the additional charge and that I ended up having to work it out for myself !