• Study the size of infrastructure and security related ticket taxes and fees in absolute terms and relative to the total ticket price in the U.S. and in the European Union

• Measure both aggregate and distributive impacts of ticket taxes

These objectives are implemented as the following study goals:

• Determine the distribution of the base fare and individual taxes and fees making up the total fare for typical travel patterns

• Measure how ticket taxes change with the cost of a ticket

• Measure how ticket taxes change with trip distance

• Measure how ticket taxes change by type of carrier (legacy vs. low-cost carrier)

• Measure how ticket taxes have changed over time

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the MIT Global Airline Industry Program, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Amadeus, S.A. We also wish to thank many individuals at the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, TSA, Amadeus, Lufthansa, and SAS Group for valuable assistance, as well as Professor Severin Borenstein of the University of California at Berkeley and Amadeus, S.A. for providing the U.S. and EU databases, respectively. Any errors in this work and all views expressed are entirely our own.