Here’s an interesting little tidbit that I’m sure will endear Virgin Atlantic to the budget travelers of the blogosphere: the airline has announced new fuel surcharges, but, in a surprising move, says it will add higher fuel surcharges to upper and premium class tickets than economy tickets.

This contrasts with the philosophy espoused by many U.S. airlines. Haven’t you noticed that so many of the new fees travelers face only apply to the passengers who pay the least for their tickets?

For its part, Virgin Atlantic doesn’t claim to be implementing the scaled fee structure for altruistic reasons, but rather for practical ones:

Steve Ridgway, Chief Executive of Virgin Atlantic, said, “With jet fuel prices now at levels that challenge the very nature and structure of the entire airline industry, we have decided to levy fuel charges depending on where you sit in the plane. Our Upper Class and Premium Economy passengers benefit from considerably more space on our aircraft and larger baggage allowances than our Economy passengers, so our aircraft burn more fuel to carry them. We believe that Economy passengers should pay lower fuel charges than passengers in our two premium cabins as their carbon footprint is around half of those seated towards the front of the plane.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Air Travel, Travel Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.