August 26th, 2015
Have you reclaimed your Air Passenger Duty (APD) for children under 12?
I returned from holiday at the beginning of the month. I very nearly forgot all about reclaiming the APD that I had paid for two children when booking my flights before the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement in December 2014. In this statement he announced that APD would be scrapped for children under the age of 12 from 1 May 2015. Whilst only £26 in total, the accountant in me couldn’t let Ryanair keep it. That almost covers my 6 bottles of wine on special offer from M&S when I buy 6 and get 25% off. Post holiday blues definitely dictated that this should be claimed!
APD is a tax paid by all airlines to HMRC on outbound flights from the UK and is a cost that most airlines pass on directly to their customers.
Reclaiming the tax depends on which airline you paid it to initially, each have their own refund policy. You may have been lucky and flown with one of the airlines that directly refunded their customers automatically. I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Ryanair are happy to refund but you need to go to their website and make a refund claim. Once I had done this, the reclaim was made within a couple of days, so very straightforward. However, I am sure that they, and other airlines, are sitting on many pounds worth of unclaimed tax.
There are no time limits to claiming and took me all of 5 minutes from thinking about it to doing it. Worth doing.
