Holidays get cheaper for families who take flight

FAMILY holidays will cost less from tomorrow as Air Passenger Duty (APD) airport departure tax is scrapped for under-12s.

The abolition will mean parents with two youngsters will save as much as £142 on longhaul trips to destinations such as the US, Thailand and Australia.

The saving on short-haul holidays will be £13 for each child under 12, with APD due to be scrapped for under-16s from March 2016.

Air travellers have already benefited from the reorganisation of the pricing bands for APD, which came into effect on 1 April. This rejigging resulted in the scrapping of the two highest APD rates, meaning air travellers were left with two rates for economy-seat travel – a Band A rate of £13 per passenger on flights of less than 2,000 miles and a Band B rate of £71 per passenger for flights of more than 2,000 miles.

Band A includes European destinations as well as Turkey, Western Russia, Morocco and Tunisia. The scrapping of the higher rates also ends a vagary in the system which saw UK travellers paying more in APD for an eight-hour flight to, say, Barbados, than on an 11-hour flight to San Francisco.

Mark Tanzer, chief executive of travel organisation Abta, said: “Families flying as part of their holidays this summer will be pleased to see a reduction in air tax. Whilst this is undoubtedly good news for holidaymakers, British travellers still face the highest air taxes on air travel anywhere in Europe and Abta is committed to making the case against this damaging tax.”