(no subject)

[nonelvis]

I have just spent nearly an hour on the phone with my sister trying to determine our flight dates and hotel possibilities for the London trip. Virgin Atlantic is having a big sale, so we thought, what the hell, we'll book our flights tonight if we can find good pricing.

"Premium Economy," as in, "slightly roomier cattle-car," is $690 round-trip. Sweet! And then you add the $460 of taxes and fees on top of that.

Allow me to repeat that: an additional $460 in taxes and fees, or 2/3 the cost of the ticket.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO.

We wisely abandoned our plan to buy tickets tonight and are instead going to start looking at package deals, since you can now start booking for the early fall. We may end up having to fly economy after all, but such is life. My willingness and ability to splurge on this trip ends somewhere around the point where I have to nearly pay for an entire second ticket to get where I'm going.

Comments

[elliptic-eye.livejournal.com]

$460 of taxes and fees on top of that.

…What?

[nonelvis]

That was pretty much my response, absent a number of profanities.

[elliptic-eye.livejournal.com]

But… but how? Which side of the pond is taxing 66%, and… well… how? Do they explain what "fees" means at all?

[nonelvis]

I was wondering that myself, so I ran the same flight dates and seating level through British Airways' site and got pretty much the same amount of taxes and fees. $87 of it is a fuel surcharge, and there are miscellaneous smaller fees that, along with the fuel charge, probably account for about $150 of the extra money. What's missing, and what I think is really killing us, is probably some kind of traffic fee from Heathrow. Unfortunately, the only nonstop flights from Boston to London fly into Heathrow, so unless we are willing to risk changing planes (i.e., risking our luggage won't make it with us), Heathrow it is.