I recently helped a friend find flights he could redeem with Air France miles he’d collected a few years ago, and I was shocked to find that even on a “free” award ticket that he had earned by flying Air France flights, he was expected to pay close to $400 in taxes alone. When I looked up similar fees for other airlines, I found that the American airlines aligned with Air France through the SkyTeam Alliance redeem international award tickets for their frequent travelers for something around $50.
$50 compared to $400 for the same flights (the flights are operated by Northwest)?!? Why the huge discrepancy in fees?
Besides the fuel surcharge (that American airlines will probably also inevitably hit us all with), we can call the problem “The Chirac Tax” because it was started by France’s former president Jacques Chirac. It seems to be his only actual activity while in office (other than not invading Iraq), since as president he seems to have mainly stood inside the Elysees Palace and watched the rioting, jobless crowds out the window, without the thought occurring to him to actually be president.
Chirac loved taxing airline tickets so much he even asked the UN to tax every single international airline ticket to fight AIDS, and then he asked one more time in the name of that general catch-all, “international development.”
In other words, Chirac wanted to make it harder for normal people to visit these countries (by piling on hundreds of dollars in taxes) so that we can spend money in these countries for the precise reason that their economies suffer because no one visits them. That’s a fantastic idea! Since there seems to be no such tax on private planes, Chirac himself wouldn’t be affected, of course.
Perhaps this is Chirac’s best legacy, then. Between these taxes and the huge fuel surcharges that Air France and other European airlines are charging, I’m sure his policies are really keeping all those pesky tourists away from Paris.
The Northwest/KLM flights that my friend is taking would have cost him $50 if he had chosen to join Northwest’s frequent flyer program in the beginning rather than that of Air France. Northwest would even allow him to redeem the same amount of miles he used for this flight for Air France flights, for only $50.
In the future, he’ll be collecting Delta Skymiles rather than Flying Blue points.
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