Monthly Archives: February 2009

Since when is a handling fee not a charge?

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By James Avery, Flightmapping.com founder.

There is a lot to like about Aer Lingus, especially when they give you the opportunity to take cheap flights to Ireland without having to endure the constant sales patter and rugby scrummage that you would otherwise experience with Ryanair. I have personally only flown with them once, on a flight from Birmingham to Dublin in January 2007, and found the experience to be extremely pleasant, with friendly check-in and on-board staff for the short hop across the Irish Sea.

Now British customers have even more opportunity to experience their service, with their opening up of a base in Gatwick this April, in addition to the cheap flights they already operate from Belfast. We know that Aer Lingus might have caused local uproar in Ireland by their cancellation of the Shannon to Heathrow route (reinstated this spring), but how do they greet British users who’ve never flown with them before and who are considering booking Aer Lingus flights on their website for the first time?

Their site carries a banner advert claiming that they are ‘easily beating easyJet’ on four key routes out of Gatwick where both airlines compete (Nice, Munich, Vienna and Zürich), claiming that flights are available from £9.99 one way, including all taxes and charges. If you attempt to use the Aer Lingus.com website to book any other flights, you will also be quoted a fare which is ‘including all taxes and charges.’ So why introduce a €10 (£8) per return flight transaction charge? Isn’t this a kick in the teeth to all passengers who think they have bagged a bargain? Surely such practices contravene regulations?

Well, it turns out that in this case, Aer Lingus have unfortunately stooped down to Ryanair’s level, and they are able to get away with his cheek, because this transaction charge is not quite 100% compulsory. Therefore, when they say ‘including all taxes and charges’ that can be the case for some passengers. Even though you have to fill in all your details before you can get the opportunity to have it wiped off, you can at least avoid this charge if you pay for your flights using an electron debit card, as is also the case with Ryanair. Easyjet also charge extra for payment by any card other than electron, but if you pay by other debit cards you will still only have to pay £1.95 per booking with easyJet, regardless of how many passengers travelling. With Aer Lingus and Ryanair, you pay a fee for every person, and for each sector (one-way flight) travelled.

Annoying as this all might be, rather than get worked up by his blatant abuse of goodwill, we would suggest you get down to your local bank and ask them if they can give you an electron card, or open up a basic current account which has this facility, and use it to pay for future flights with airlines like Aer Lingus and Ryanair. I know that there’s a lot of banks with bad names at the moment out there, but apart from recommending the mutual Nationwide, because they don’t charge handling fees when you use your card abroad (but I don’t think they issue Visa electron cards), I would suggest Co-op’s cash minder account, which can be topped up instantly from any post office.

Cheap flights to Morocco – how to avoid Gordon Brown’s rip-off air passenger duty

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Continued from Flightmapping’s cheap flights to Morocco page

Are you fed up with searching for cheap flights to Morocco, only to find that those one pound flight deals end up costing way more than you bargained for by the time you add all the extra taxes and charges? 

The extortionate extra charges passengers have to pay on flights to Morocco are entirely down to Gordon Brown’s £40 air passenger duty stealth tax, a fee that is supposed to go some way towards compensate for the environmental damage caused by passenger aircraft. This is fine in principal, but it makes no sense in practice when Morocco flights are classified in the same tax bracket as flights to Australia. Morocco is roughly 1500 miles from the UK, whereas Australia is over 10,000 miles away – the maths simply doesn’t add up.  

Is there a way round this?

Budget minded travellers who want to see a little bit more of Morocco, and who have the luxury of time on their hands, might want to look for cheap flights to Gibraltar, or any airport in southern Spain, such as Malaga, instead, and then travel to Morocco by sea. By doing this you will only have to pay £10 air passenger duty. 

Gibraltar

  • Because of the amount of walking, you might do between airports, buses and railway stations, we would recommend doing this type of journey with hand luggage only. This will also help you save on airline baggage fees.
  • If you fly into Gibraltar, you can walk from the airport to the Spanish border town of La Linea in around 15 minutes. Local buses from La Linea to the ferry port of Algeciras (approximately €2; 45 minutes; every 30 minutes).

Southern Spain

Cheap flights to Malaga are available from just about every UK international airport, but flights to Seville will take you closer to Algeciras.

Suggestion:  If you are interested in Arabic architecture, why not combine a trip to Morocco with a trip to Andalusia? You might also want to consider flights to Granada, to visit the famous Alhambra, or to Seville, to visit its famous citadel. Although it is easiest to explore the region in a rental car, budget travellers can easily get between cities in Andalusia by coach or train. The high-speed AVE train service provides a rapid link between Seville and Malaga, with a brief change in Cordoba. This would allow you time to visit Cordoba’s famous mosque. Unfortunately, the AVE doesn’t yet stop in Granada, so you will need to get there by coach. For information about buses in Andalusia, see Andalusia.com.

To travel between Málaga and Algeciras, you will need to allow around one hour 45 minutes [http://www.ctsa-portillo.com/ima/pdf/malaga-estacion.pdf], plus another half an hour to transfer between Malaga airport and Malaga bus station. Depending on the flight timings from your local airport, you should certainly be able to make it to Algeciras in the same day, and there is a good chance that you will be able to reach the Moroccan port of Tangier. The bus between Málaga and Algeciras costs €11.68.

From Spain to Morocco by ferry

There are various different companies offering ferry travel between Algeciras in Spain and Tangier in Morocco. We tried booking ahead for travel in May, but the ferry companies we tried only had advance bookings for the next three weeks. You really shouldn’t have any problems travelling as a foot passenger on any of these ferries, especially as services are frequent. The high-speed ferries take just one hour — you will actually be timetabled to arrive in Morocco before you leave Spain, due to the time differences between the two countries. Who says that budget travellers can’t feel like they are on Concorde?  There isn’t much price difference between the high-speed ferries and the slower services, which take around 2 1/2 hours — €37 for the fast ferry, versus €33 for the slow ferry. However, we wouldn’t recommend paying extra for the speedy journey, unless you have a particular train you want to catch and Tangier. Besides, why pay more to be boxed in to an airtight container, when you can see so much more from a conventional open ferry? Note that these prices are for foot passengers — most car hire companies will not allow you to take your vehicle from Spain into Morocco.

You might already be asking where the savings are, as you have already forked out most of the difference between your Marrakech flight and your Gibraltar flight on the ferry to Tangier. We’d simply like to point out that by taking a circuitous route, you will see so much more than you would by flying direct to Marrakech.

However you decide to arrange your trip to Morocco, we just think that you will get much better value by going out through Gibraltar or Spain, and using the difference in air passenger duty to pay for your ferry journey and a few drinks on the way. If you fly into Gibraltar, you will also get to experience one of the most exciting landings anywhere in the world!

Continuing down to Casablanca and Marrakech

Allow a good half an hour to stroll through Tangier from the port to the new Tangier Ville station. Trains in Morocco are very similar to the ones you might expect in regional France, although they are a great deal cheaper!  Allow around six hours for the train to Marrakech, and ten hours to continue to Casablanca. You might prefer to take the overnight sleeper, which departs from Tangier at 9.05pm, arriving in Marrakech at 8:05am the next morning. The price for a couchette is 350 Moroccan dirhams (£29), or 190 dirhams (approximately £16) for a seat. 

Heading home

After all this effort, and seeing so many places on the way, you will may want to the simple option of a direct flight home.  The advantage of doing it this way is that the prices on flights to the UK from Morocco are usually a great deal cheaper than they are on the way out, plus you won’t have to pay any air passenger duty.

The cheapest flights to Switzerland involve flights to a neighbouring country, but not France

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Switzerland might have much more a reputation as a tax haven van as a bargain basement paradise, but here is a little-known option of finding the cheapest flights to Switzerland, and enjoying the scenery along the way. It is well-known that cheap flights to Geneva are available from a huge range of different airports throughout the UK, and that you can also get cheap flights to Basel, whose airport is technically in neighbouring France, from Stansted and Dublin courtesy of Ryanair, and Liverpool courtesy of easyJet. So what’s our little secret? Cheap flights to Zürich — that bastion of palatial airport facilities? Surely not? Well, with Aer Lingus and easyJet now fighting it out amongst each other to offer cheap flights from London Gatwick to Zürich, easyJet also offering Zürich flights from Luton, you might well be able to bag a bargain, but if you’re prepared to travel with only hand luggage and if you have got yourself one of those otherwise pointless electron cards then you should probably know that the very cheapest fares on flights to Europe are still offered by Ryanair.

We looked at cheap flights to Switzerland in April 2009, and Ryanair’s prices on flights to Basel were very compatible with what easyJet and Aer Lingus had to offer on flights to Zürich. The real bargain was on flights to Friedrichshafen in neighbouring Germany, which are available for £20 return “all-in.” All very well you might say, but you asked the cheap flights to Switzerland, not cheap flights to Germany. Well, as it happens, Friedrichshafen is a mere 45 minutes away from Romanshorn in Switzerland, on the other side of Lake Constance by ferry (hourly service). From here, there are regular trains throughout Switzerland via Zürich.

Trains connect from Friedrichshafen Airport (Flughafen) to downtown (Stadt) Friedrichshafen in just 6 minutes, and there are at least 4 services each hour. And the cost of this ferry transfer, with scenery thrown in? A mere €7 – but if you are using a Swiss Transfer Ticket (strongly recommended), you will pay half price. So next time you are thinkinh of cheap flights to Switzerland, why not give this route a try?