DONEX Taxes and fees this high?
 

Hello:

Just bought a Donex BKK-HKG-JFK-LAS-LAX-LHR-HKG-SYD-PER-AKL-HKG-BKK for December. Taxes and additional fees on this fare were additional $810 USD ? does this sound correct?

Thanks!

Sounds ok for me. The last 2 i bought early this year where in the 500 / 600 US$ range. Fuel surcharges have gone up since then. Also LHR and SYD are airports with high taxes.

The OP has quite a few QF flights - QF fuel surcharges are high.

My experience, particularly with the CX flights, has been that you can save a significant amount on taxes if the ticketing is done through AA, even if you have no AA flights or codeshares on the ticket. Might be worth asking your BKK TA if they are able to get a price using AA.

Wouldn't AA be reluctant to talk to you if they don't get any of the business - especially the first sector or long-haul?

I can only see two that would have to be on QF....am I missing something?

Not really. AA RTW sometimes tries to steer you towards an AA flight when such option exists, but otherwise are quite prepared to sell you the ticket without a single AA flight on it. Curiously, some AA agents, like Emeco for example, will refuse to do the same.

I find this hard to believe.
I know that AA rewards on QF metal do not include the QF fuel surcharge which would be charged using a QF miles reward.
But how can the cost of a paid ticket depend on who does the ticketing?

Isn't the airline industry amazing? There are 2 answers to your question:

1. For all tickets, some government taxes depend upon the SITI/SOTO status. For example, GST in Australia applies to tickets sold within Australia for domestic Australian flights, but does not apply to the same ticket sold outside of Australia. Thus a QF flight SYD-PER will be cheaper when ticketed by AA (or any other airline outside of Australia) than when ticketed by QF (the GST amount of 15% is quite significant). This is a completely legal tax loophole.

2. For RTW tickets, each segment can be on any of the 8 (soon to be 10) Oneworld airlines. Rather amazingly each have a different fuel surcharge amount (in fact several different fuel surcharge amounts, as it is often different for trans-Atlantic vs. trans-Pacific, etc.). The OW airlines decided that this make the OWE tax calculation too complicated, and agreed that the ticketing airline will use its own fuel surcharge amount for each sector on the ticket. When this was decided, years ago, the fuel surcharge was either zero or a very small amount, so it didn't seem to be important. Over the years some airlines have decided to increase fares, while others have increased fuel surcharges. For a while the AA fuel surcharge was much less; a few months ago this changed, now AA increased their surcharge, however it is still less than BA, QF, etc. So the short answer is that the airlines are doing this to avoid having to have a computer system calculate the correct fuel surcharge amount for each segment. The "high tax" airline customers overpay, and the "low tax" customers underpay; overall it balances out, but creates an arbitrage possibility for how you buy a ticket.

Has anyone ever ticketed a RTW on Lan? How are they for taxes as compared to AA and QF which I know is the worst?

No idea as to how they are on fuel surcharges (which is the only variable in the cost, the real taxes are the same for all airlines), however LAN is hopeless for ticketing and unless you know someone at LAN you will never be able to actually get the ticket issued. It will take 100x the effort of dealing with AA. I tried once, and after the first hour hadn't managed to get LAN to understand that I was trying to buy a OWE product; gave up at that point. Perhaps there is a RTW specialist person at LAN, but I never found them.

Thanks for the insight re fuel surcharges. When they first became a topic here, I got the mistaken impression that the ticketing airline applied its fuel surcharges to its segments, but charged zero for segments on other carriers. I argued that that didn't make sense at all, and am glad to read that it doesn't have to.

The scheme of "ticketing carrier applies their fuel surcharge" almost makes sense for tickets that are valid on any OW carrier, otherwise a "free" carrier change would be a bit more complicated, with money changing hands.

LAN is at least moderately confused - as I've mentioned a couple of times, it took half an hour on the phone with res to book a AKL-SYD segment - ten minutes to convince the agent that her airline actually flew the segment, and the rest for her and her supervisor to figure out how to book it. (How can it not be visible in their own CRS when I could see it in EF?)

Maybe their CRS doesn't display AKL-SYD except in conjunction with SCL-AKL, as for most routes they cannot sell overseas segments ... probably AKL-SYD is one of the few open skies routes that they have (so they are allowed to sell it to anyone). A great example of technology that has run amuck.

No, it's not that, the CRS can see it fine, just a clueless agent, that's all, hardly a unique case.