After the first oil crisis in 1973, European charter airlines began to introduce fuelsurcharges in an attempt to pass on the additional costs of fuel to the touristswho used their services as part of package tours. In the highly regulatedcommercial environment of that era, the tour operators' catalogue prices werelegally binding and contracts with airlines and hotels were renegotiated onlytwice a year. Therefore, fuel surcharges were the only legal means to react tounexpected increases of the fuel price. By contrast, in today's highly deregulatedmarket place, airlines can pass on higher costs to passengers by increasingbase fares on the spot. Nevertheless, most large carriers prefer fuelsurcharges over adjustments of basic fares. We hold that this choice posessubstantial risks of anticompetitive and anti-consumer behaviour. Not only haveantitrust authorities worldwide (e.g. in the UK and the USA) in several casesconvicted some of the world's largest airlines of illegal price-fixing in the guise offuel surcharge cartels, and imposed combined fines in excess of €1.0bn. Giventhat fuel surcharges often are unrelated to the distance travelled and differsubstantially between traffic regions, it remains doubtful that all cartels weredestroyed, however. Finally, fuel surcharges may give rise to misleadingadvertising, especially for frequent flyer award tickets. Against this backdrop wewill discuss the case for a complete ban of fuel surcharges or, alternatively, amandatory formula-based approach for their calculation.
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