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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Caribbean Tourism Organisation welcomes UK reform of Air Passenger Duty

by

20140319

The Unit­ed King­dom will be re­form­ing its con­tro­ver­sial air pas­sen­ger du­ty (APD), Chan­cel­lor of the Ex­che­quer George Os­borne an­nounced in his bud­get ad­dress yes­ter­day.He said from next year, all long haul flights will be low­ered to the same rate as those head­ed to the Unit­ed States, in­clud­ing flights to the Caribbean, al­though that over­all rate will be ris­ing from its 2013 num­ber.

"We will al­so re­form air pas­sen­ger du­ty to end the crazy sys­tem where you pay less tax trav­el­ing to Hawaii than you do trav­el­ing to Chi­na or In­dia," Os­borne said. "It hits ex­ports, puts off tourists and cre­ates a great sense of in­jus­tice among our Caribbean and South Asian com­mu­ni­ties here in Britain."

As of April 2015, the APD will be sim­pli­fied in­to a two-band sys­tem: Band A for short-haul flights of less than 2,000 miles from Lon­don and Band B for all long-haul flights more than 2,000 miles from Lon­don. The new Band B will be charged at the planned rate in 2015-16 (�71 for re­duced-rate pas­sen­gers and �142 for stan­dard-rate pas­sen­gers).

The news has been wel­comed by Caribbean Tourism Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CTO) chair­man Bev­er­ly Nichol­son-Doty, who said: "This is a com­plete vic­to­ry for the Caribbean which, led by the CTO, has been lob­by­ing against the un­fair sys­tem which charged a high­er rate of APD on flights to Bar­ba­dos than Hawaii and placed the Unit­ed States at a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage.

"We are de­light­ed that the chan­cel­lor has fi­nal­ly ac­cept­ed the Caribbean's pro­pos­al made in No­vem­ber 2010 to re­turn to the sim­pler and fair­er two-band sys­tem."


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