The government wants to tax the most expensive plane tickets

The government is considering taxing the most expensive airline tickets. After the “superprofits” of car dealershipsutes or private jet fuelit is a new track that the executive is digging to finance the 100 billion euro plan to renovate the SNCF network and announced by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne at the end of February. “The ecological transition and the modal transfer from the plane to the train must also go through this kind of deviceexplains the entourage of Clement BeauneMinister of Transport, quoted by Le Parisien. A priori, a person who already pays a high price for their ticket is less sensitive to the price“.

The tax, which will a priori concern first cl and business tickets, should appear in the finance bill, debated next fall in the National embly and bring in approximately “a hundred million euros over the period 2023-2027“, according to the Ministry of Transport. By way of comparison, the government hopes to recover “several billionwith the tax on the superprofits of motorway concessionaires. On the side of Air France, which has just published a negative net result of 344 million euros in the 1st quarter of 2023it is emphasized that France is “the country that already taxes airlines the most“. The airline claims that the funds raised are used “to the decarbonization of the sector» and warns the government that, otherwise, «we are going to fall far behind in our decarbonization objective.»

As a reminder, in 2020, carriers had already suffered an increase in the solidarity tax on plane tickets, known as the “Chirac tax”, created in 2005 during the second term of the former President of the Republic. At the time, this environmental tax had increased from 9 to 18 euros for these same tickets in business cl and 1.5 to 3 euros for economy cl flights and was expected to bring in some 182 million euros per year.