[nly]

If the breakdowns given by the airlines are to be believed, the bulk of the retail cost of a plane ticket these days are in taxes, fees and duties.

I booked a ~£400 return flight from the UK to the States just a few weeks ago and the airline claim to be only getting 40% of that. I'm not sure where fuel fits in.

[slg]

For what it is worth, flights between the UK and the US are some of the most heavily taxed flights in the world. Sometimes you are better off with a connecting flight from a European carrier that stops somewhere like France or Ireland.

[fendale]

I live in Belfast so I can either use a UK airport (Belfast), or Dublin. In my previous job, we flew business class from the UK to San Fran fairly regularly. It was often £500 - £1000 cheaper to fly Dublin to SFO connecting through London than Belfast -> London -> SFO. Infact, even pricing the London to SFO on the same flight (leaving out the Belfast leg), it was £500 cheaper to start in Dublin.

The price difference was all tax - and lots of it!

[arprocter]

The strangest thing I've come across was saving several hundred pounds by booking a return flight instead of one way, and just not using the flight back.

[JoshGlazebrook]

This is what SkipLagged does for customers.

[stephenc_c_]

I started a recent flight from LHR to SFO in DUB and saved about £1000 in business class. The flight actually went DUB-LHR-SFO so you end up going back to where you started, but it worked out significantly cheaper!

[nly]

Last two times I've been I've not been able to find an advantage in doing so.

[malchow]

It is truly shocking the quotient going to fees, taxes, and duties. Almost any flight I take between SFO and Western Europe ends up being >50% fees, taxes, duties.

It makes one wonder what marginal meetings are _not_ taking place because the 50% taxation (the fault of both port operating companies, state governments, the U.S. federal government, and their equivalents on the European side) makes it infeasible for those who are ever so slightly less fortunate.

Imagine the cost of travel -- and of interpersonal connection -- being halved because these taxes went away. Who's to say it's better to hire another Social Security Administration Vice President than it is to enable a CRISPR researcher at Stanford to meet a pharma exec in London?

(You might think that government would grind to a halt. . . but of course government only spends a paltry percentage of its winnings on things like transportation.[1])

[1] http://solomonkahn.com/us_budget/#