My Take | Passengers pay for Cathay’s mistake
Hong Kong’s pride in the sky has again suffered a huge loss thanks to making wrong-way bets on fuel prices. And loyal customers are being hit with a fuel surcharge as a result
Someone help me understand this new fuel surcharge from Cathay Pacific and its sister airline Dragonair. I want to be as fair as possible because it is a big newspaper advertiser and I hate to bite one of the hands that feeds me. My dogs and my family also fly quite a bit on Cathay, seeing how it’s a whole lot friendlier to pets than Air Canada, which incidentally banned carrying dogs for the whole summer until this month.
The surcharge of HK$109 will kick in from September 15 for inbound passengers, though those flying out of Hong Kong will be spared because of a government regulation.
It will apply to flights to Hong Kong from the Southwest Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, starting from next Thursday.
Other flights including those between New York and Vancouver will be subject to a surcharge of HK$24 per journey.
But didn’t they used to charge extra for fuels because oil prices were sky-high at about US$100 a barrel? Now they are charging because prices are low? OK, they aren’t as low as they were in January when they were south of US$30, but at about US$46 a barrel, that’s more than half of what prices were back in 2014.