By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Recently I tried to buy airline tickets for my wife and daughter for a return visit to China. It seems there are a lot of bargains available in the way of airfares. Unfortunately, none of them seem to be for travel to China. Maybe it’s the airlines’ way (or somebody’s way) of exacting some degree of payback on China and/or its citizens, and/or anybody who wants to go there, for all their success lately.

After extensive perusal of the internet, I did find some good deals. A website called Cheapflights.com had lots of reasonable fares from Seattle to Beijing. If you clicked on an attractive fare of $672 round trip (RT), you were then dispatched to another site called Cheapair.com. In the blink of an eye, $672 was suddenly $1318. Heckuva tax. At least for the days I wanted. Theoretically, you could enter a different date and day of the week for each leg of your travel and get a completely different quote. Which, I suppose, is why we have travel agents.

I persisted. Another site, offering an $858 fare before tax, transferred me to CheapOAir.com, which did a little better. There I found a RT for my wife for $1157.60 plus $919.60 for the kid (she’s ten). Which, with taxes and fees, came out to $2130.77. Still a lot, when you consider that trips to Europe this summer are running as low as $358 RT (wait, did that include taxes? I’d better check). Travelocity found me flights with Korean Air for only $2442.70. Hotwire was higher.

I want to reiterate that one of my two passengers is a minor child. Granted she needs a seat of her own. She weighs about 60 pounds. Her mom weighs all of maybe 100, after a big meal. A fellow passenger, who could easily crowd them out of 2/3 of their row of three, might weigh in at 350 pounds and pay the same fare (this has happened to me).

Which leads me to the fuel surcharge. For the past several years, airlines have trumped up one excuse or another to add on fuel surcharges, especially for international travel, which could sometimes be more than the price of the ticket itself. As recently as a week ago, Cheapflights.com was listing airfares for this current season to Beijing for as little as $368. But down on the bottom of the page, the asterisk (those pesky asterisks) noted that the fare did not include the “fuel and security surcharge” which would be an additional $395. I checked on several domestic carriers and they all had the same thing, although the fee range was startling. And this, I might add, was ten months since the actual oil price surge. Last August, oil was up over $100 a barrel. At which time, surcharges went crazy. A Boeing 757-200 holds 11,489 gallons; the 757-300 holds 11,466 gallons. The price of jet fuel remains close to that of auto fuel. At today’s rate of $1.57 per gallon, the total cost of fuel for this jet is $18,000 and change, which, with a passenger load of 300, would come to a stiff $60 per passenger. That’s a whole lot less than $395. But then, maybe the rest was for the security. Wait a minute. What security? The government pays for that (through the nose) already. More than we asked for. How much does it cost to strip search somebody’s grandma these days? Maybe back in 2001 this made sense to some people, but it’s not exactly a high tech operation. Hence, the surcharges were bogus from the start, and I’m glad to see they have suddenly vanished. Hopefully for good.

Meanwhile, fed up with the choices of so-called cheap airfares online, my wife finally called a travel agent. After two tries she found a very reasonable fare on Korean Airlines via AA Travel in Seattle (comparatively speaking) of $960 for herself and $790 for the kid, which came to $1750, including tax, tip, and commission. So much for cheap fares online. And no gas surcharge.

They even get lunch!

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.