How to avoid airline surcharges | Coffee Break Ep102 | 4-21-26
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Airline fuel surcharges are going up! We've recently seen Air France KLM Flying Blue and Virgin Atlantic increase surcharges on their awards and it's looking like a trend. In this podcast episode, we'll talk about the different ways you can avoid them.
How to avoid airline surcharges
(02:02) - Booking with an alliance partner that doesn't pass along surcharges
(02:15) - Air France KLM Flying Blue booked with Virgin Atlantic or Japan Airline Mileage Bank miles
Learn more about going to Europe starting on Air France or KLM Business Class using Virgin Atlantic points here
Learn more about Air France without surcharges via Japan Airline Mileage Bank miles here
(04:02) - Rove miles
Learn more about using Rove miles here
(07:04) - Lufthansa booked through other Star Alliance partners
(07:41) - One World is tricky...
(11:38) - What can you do about high taxes coming back from the UK?
(12:45) - For travel to and from Europe, consider JetBlue's flights booked through Qatar Avios
Learn about booking JetBlue with Qatar Avios here
(16:34) - SAS
(17:51) - Airlines that don't charge surcharges in the first place
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Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. |
| 0:03.9 | You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. |
| 0:11.0 | Welcome to Freakimilers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. |
| 0:16.3 | And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. |
| 0:23.5 | Today's coffee break, airline surcharges. |
| 0:27.4 | They're going up, up, up. |
| 0:29.2 | We're going to talk about how to avoid them. |
| 0:43.8 | As you can hopefully hear from that, we are recording in front of a live audience today. |
| 0:49.9 | This is our first time ever giving that a try, and we're at the Toronto Points Travel Festival. |
| 0:54.2 | And hopefully it'll go well. |
| 0:58.9 | And, you know, if it works out well, we'll do more of these at future events. But I'm really glad that they have us here. |
| 1:01.6 | Okay, so people cheered, and I don't know whether they cheered Greg for us or they cheered for reducing surcharges. |
| 1:07.1 | But surcharges are increasing. |
| 1:10.0 | We've recently seen Air France, KLM Flying Blue, |
| 1:12.5 | increased surcharges on their awards. |
| 1:14.2 | We've seen Virgin Atlantic, increased surcharges on their awards. |
| 1:18.0 | This is a trend that seems like it may be here and here to stay. |
| 1:21.8 | So today we ought to talk about the ways to get around that, |
| 1:24.7 | the programs to book through to avoid having to pay some of those |
| 1:27.9 | high surcharges. Yeah. So, Nick, I know you have ideas about this, like right off the top |
| 1:35.2 | of your head. You're dealing with this all the time because, you know, for me, I usually just book |
| 1:39.7 | for my wife and I and looking at, you know, $300 surcharges, let's say, is a lot. |
... |
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