Travel Deals A recent search for a flight from New York to London turned up an eye-catching fare: $229 each way on several airlines. But nine government taxes and fees added $162 — more than a quarter of the total ticket price.
Baggage fees may be the cause of more grumbling among passengers, but airlines are trying to draw attention to other charges lurking in the fine print: all the taxes and fees that go toward airport projects, air traffic control, airport security, customs inspections and, in some cases, projects that have nothing to do with flying — like a French “solidarity tax” on departing passengers that is meant to subsidize purchases of drugs to fight diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries.
Most of these taxes are small individually, but they can add up to a significant share of the price of a ticket, particularly for international flights. While there is some debate about precisely how much ticket taxes have risen in recent years, airline representatives say that governments are increasingly turning to travelers to raise revenue in lean times, and that there is little oversight over how the money is spent.
“We are taxed entirely too much,” said David A. Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group that has been battling efforts to add or increase air travel taxes. “We can’t have outside organizations reaching out for more when the airline industry is losing billions of dollars. There just has to be some other way to fund these programs people want to introduce.” Read more »
Travel Deals “FOUR years ago I would have told you that none of this would be possible here in Murcia,” said José Martinez Calvo, a native of this province in the southeast corner of Spain and a respected art dealer who owns the Madrid gallery Espacio Mínimo. “When my colleagues here told me what they were planning, I told them all to have a Plan B because this was just never going to happen.”
Well, it happened. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Calvo was standing in a lofty, light-filled gallery dotted with minimalist sculptures by the Irish artist Eva Rothschild at La Conservera, a converted cannery in the little village of Ceutí. Located 10 miles outside the regional capital city of Murcia — and a full five-hour drive southeast from Madrid — Ceutí feels light-years away from trendy, gallery-dense neighborhoods like Chueca in Madrid. But cleaned up and stripped of machinery, the factory’s open industrial spaces make spectacular galleries. And La Conservera, which opened last May, is just one piece of Murcia’s emergence as an artistic center.
Nearly a dozen new museums, galleries and other spaces devoted to creative use have popped up all across the often underappreciated province. Known as Spain’s vegetable garden — the region’s pata negra tomatoes inspire almost the same reverence as the jamón of the same name — Murcia typically makes national headlines only when there is a government battle over agricultural water rights or all-too-frequent real estate scandals surrounding development along the coast.
But in recent years, as government officials across Spain have succumbed to the so-called Bilbao effect — investing hundreds of millions of euros in shiny new arts centers in hopes that urban revitalization would quickly follow — Murcia has taken another road. Instead of putting all its cultural eggs in one high-priced basket, the local government is betting on a decentralized plan to spread cultural riches throughout the province.
The region is also exploiting raw materials: a considerable inventory of abandoned factories, Art Nouveau mansions, convents and churches just waiting for a second life. With renovation costs and start-up budgets that average well under 10 million euros a project, these properties have become the architectural equivalent of found objects converted to high art. Read more »
Baggage fees may be the cause of more grumbling among passengers, but airlines are trying to draw attention to other charges lurking in the fine print: all the taxes and fees that go toward airport projects, air traffic control, airport security, customs inspections and, in some cases, projects that have nothing to do with flying — like a French “solidarity tax” on departing passengers that is meant to subsidize purchases of drugs to fight diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries.