Sunday, September 23, 2012

Air fares are cheap


Reading the title of this post you might say "no way". Just recently i received an e mail from British Airways asking for me to sign a petition to stop the UK government increasing the APD Air Passenger Duty. We paid £65($98) each.
Now looking at the rates chart on the left from the Customs and Excise site the mileages in the first column state that the 4799 miles to Seattle should be band C £81($121) but it appears the capital city of a country is used for calculating so Washington DC is 3670 miles band B. Surprised they didn`t charge per mile all the way.
Anyway back to the `Air fares are cheap` title of this post.




Our trip in November consists of five flights, 3 internal and the 2 across the pond. As you can see below the extras £377( $565) nothing to do with the airline, apart from fuel surcharge, add up to almost half the price of the flight. I suppose to be fair fuel price is out of the airlines control as much as the other charges.
 The total mileage of our trip is 8171 at a cost of £764($1146) each. Looking at this  per mile it works out at 9.5pence(15cents) and you get fed. Just think if the taxes etc were zero this per mile cost would almost be halved.

Now a train journey Crewe to London is 158 miles and the cheapest ticket as you see on the right is £26($39).
Now we have a price by train of 16.4 p(25cents) per mile and no food.
So there you are cheaper by air.
Just a bit of fun on a Sunday morning........just a thought but I wonder how much by narrow boat. Looking back at my post on fuel consumption my figures are £1.18 ($1.80) per hour. So very roughly at say 3.5 miles per hour the cost by boat is 33.71p (50cents). You must of course remember that includes our hot water and electricity generation and I get fed as we travel!
As I said just a bit of fun but by all means comment if you want to, i`m all grown up and can take it.

2 comments:

  1. Did you notice?
    The government gets first billing on the listing...

    Rotters.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Bryce
    Yep the government always grab their share

    ReplyDelete

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Jaqueline Biggs