Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhtgrg | Hacker News Reader

Recently I paid to book better seats on an Air France flight and since the website was a hot mess (specifically the payment portal) I tried various VPNs to try and get through. To my surprise, prices were significantly different (about ~20% variation) depending on country, and it was most expensive in...France.

This was on a flight that had already been booked from the US long ago.

View on HN

I heard this is a common practice for cars: a french car will be sold at cheaper prices outside France. Home country adds a premium on car prices because they count on nationals to have a slightly higher willingness to pay for local brands.

Uhm, it's not directly comparable - cars have different specs in each country and it's very rare you can spec them 1:1 exactly. As an example - you'd find that the starting price of cars in Poland is much lower than in say, UK, but if you compare the spec the "base" model in Poland is missing a lot of equipment that's just standard in the UK to keep the cost down as much as possible.

I don't know about Poland specifically, but in some cases the missing equipment could be critical safety devices mandated by law. For example, from working with import, I learned that in India vehicles can be sold without airbags, and even some structural safety features (reinforced firewall and front frame rails) are not installed on Indian-market cars (mostly to remove weight, actually, not cost). Also, some markets require special vehicle features (increased required ride height was the reason that the Tesla Model 3 was not sold in India for some time) that consumers from other nations would find unpalatable. And of course, lighting, bumper height, and signalling may be different across markets. Notably, EU and American vehicles have vastly different headlamp requirements.

Sure. In my example I was comparing some cars like the VW Polo and the basic spec Polish car had an extremely basic dot matrix display for the radio while the UK car had a full colour 7 inch display as standard. The polish car didn't have air con at all, while in UK it was standard. The Polish car was missing cruise control, any infotainment buttons on the wheel and it had a non-split rear seating bench - all standard on UK spec. I don't think it had any safety differences at all.

The legal requirements should be the same in France and Poland, EU is quite big on harmonizing things like that to try and facilitate a single market.

Wineries do that too - often the bottles are cheaper in the liquor store hundreds of miles away than they are at the tasting room.

In my experience national airlines are most expensive when booked from the country itself. Lufthansa in Germany, KLM in the Netherlands, Air France in France, etc. I always assumed because nationals go to those websites first.

Could be taxes making up the difference, 20% sounds suspiciously close to the French V.A.T. rate of... 20% [1].

  [1] https://www.vatupdate.com/2021/04/21/vat-rates-in-france/

There's no VAT on international flights. Other taxes, perhaps, but that 20% difference is not so easily explained.

This was not a payment for a flight but for some extra "service", is there no V.A.T. on that either?

I'm not a tax accountant so I couldn't say for certain. But if this is an additional payment for a seat reservation on an international flight, I would assume it falls into the same category of "international travel", which I believe is zero-VAT across EU. If it was something not directly related to the travel aspect itself, e.g. pre booking an inflight meal or lounge access, I would expect VAT to apply. Or a domestic flight within France, of course.

Perhaps, though I now recall that one of the options was free. I tried that one too, but I abandoned it first in favor of the others since the checkout and "payment" experience failed in strange and unpredictable ways with that one (the others at least showed me a 'sorry this is broken' style of message).

I just looked at the prices for the cheapest ticket next month from France to Japan, first from the airfrance french website and then from their japanese one.

Cheapest ones in France are around 700-800€ when japanese ones are around 41,000¥ (~300€). This is crazy.

Are you sure it's not because the prices on the Japanese website doesn't include taxes and surchages?

Japanese website:

> All amounts are in JPY. Taxes and surcharges are excluded.

French website:

> All amounts are in EUR. Taxes, surcharges and booking fee are included.

Ah. This might be just that.

Does including all taxes amount to the same prices?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com