CommanderB wrote:Let's just be clear here...
Taxes are set by the government of the departing and arriving country (most of them anyway - some are airport fees set by the respective airports). You can see this breakdown in the fare details or on your e-ticket if you're interested. Naturally this changes per route.
The line item that says "YQ" or "Carrier imposed surcharge" is a stealth fee that all airlines use. It varies depending on internal parameters set by revenue management. You'll see it move for a lot of reasons, economic and oil price related reasons are very common. (Although most airlines are hedged on oil 12 months out, so often you see a 12 month lag in oil related increases or decreases.. thats complicated and beyond the scope of this post).
The real reason YQ actually exists from a ticketing point of view, has little to do with reward fares (although it makes up the bulk of the reward fare "fee" portion nowadays); it exists to act as a global price modifier. Consider this... airlines have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different fare combinations. They're priced on a sliding scale, inflexible fare buckets being the cheapest and the most flexible being the most expensive. Let's say an airline all of a sudden decides/needs to reprice all fares on a particular route or a region. They'd have to reprice thousands of fares manually or at the very least their ticketing system would. That's where YQ comes in. It allows airlines to easily do things like "Add £200 to every ticket combination that meets X criteria". This is true of revenue fares as well as reward fares. A lot of VS revenue fares, actually have YQ in too.
Anyway, boring ticketing waffle over...
This is pretty bad timing for VS. Hiking YQ when they're under performing compared to BA and other transatlantic carriers is completely moronic. But entirely predictable big business, out of touch with their customer base behaviour.
This will likely go the same as it always does... there will be some uproar, maybe they realise how many people are pissed (maybe they don't) and then the fees should drop down again to a more reasonable level at some point. Only revenue management know if/when. I do agree that the timing of this with the reward seat sale and recent points offers is very suspect. Give with one hand, take with another.
Indeed, it does feel very suspect with all the sales that have happened to hike the YQ. Thank you for the explanation of taxes / fees. My earlier post was in regards to specifically reward seats.
For example; say if I bought points during the sale, 200,000 points (+ 140,000 additional bonus) = 340,000 points for £3,000GBP.
190k points would cost £1,676 (3,000 / 340,000 x 190,000). Plus now £2,400 races and fees is over £4k.
Well you can buy UC cash seats for that price or less …
And I asked them on Twitter/X and they replied saying government taxes have increased and that’s why the costs has increased… but yet it’s not the taxes that have increased it is YQ surcharge.