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Since the poignant - if pointless - Charge of the Light Brigade, a succession of other charges have captured the public imagination, provoking an equal amount of tears, rage and bafflement. Thus it was, when I opened the newspaper to read the latest white-knuckle announcement, I was overcome. Those hapless travellers never saw it coming. Hope was futile. While not penned as eloquently as Tennyson's immortal poem, the news was nonetheless devastating. This time it was the rocketing fuel surcharge - one of a host of hidden charges and levies gradually insinuating themselves, with a troubling permanence, into your airline ticket.

Never since perhaps the Crimean war has travel been so fraught with charges; fees - buried under clauses and sub clauses - that often exceed the cost of the ticket itself. This is no idle scuttlebutt. Call travel agents to get an air ticket quote and they'll run rings around the issue. You'll be offered tempting fixed-departure fares, group-consolidated fares, and Apex (Advance Purchase Excursion) fares, albeit pickled in the dreaded three "nons" - non-endorsable, non-re-routable and non-refundable.

But how much does that ticket really cost? The quoted prices bear little relation to the final bill. This is because tickets are priced minus the "tax", a devious little three-letter word that opens up a rather large can of worms. Here's one example. This month, a Hong Kong-London roundtrip on British Airways could be had for a trifling HK$3,150 (Bt12,840). Not bad at all. The catch? Taxes for everything save visiting the queen would bring the price up to HK$5,267.

Why don't travel agents and airlines simply quote you the full fare for ticket and taxes and be done with it? Partly because no one wishes to take the blame for rising fuel costs, with the price of a barrel of oil breaching new highs every time a Bedouin hollers "George". Airlines prefer to portray themselves as the good guys.

They stoutly resist any posting of the full all-in fare as, according to them, that is not the ticket price. Call it what you may, but when a US$400 (Bt12,700) ticket actually costs US$675 in credit card and bollocking-from-the-boss terms, it's almost as troubling as 1,000 per cent Zimbabwean inflation. "Hello? Harare?" "Has this call been over a minute?" "Yes." "Well now your ticket costs double." "What?" "Triple."

Hidden charges have got to a point where it is no longer just the departure tax that is being tacked on (even so, you'll still pay a 750-pesos/Bt562 "terminal fee" while departing Manila). Fuel surcharges have entered common parlance, the fees constantly adjusted, not always in a rational way. Cathay Pacific's fuel charge for Hong Kong to North America was $66.40 in April. Compare this with Singapore Airline's $130 for flights from Singapore to the USA (though HK-San Francisco was pegged at $66.40), Malaysia Airlines' $109 from Kuala Lumpur to Europe or the USA, Thai Airways' $105 Bangkok-New York fuel surcharge, and United Airlines' $165 for transpacific routes.

Then look at Jet Airways (from India) with its fixed $85 levy per international sector (working out cheap for Europe but dear to the Far East) and Japan Airlines' wallet-humbling $180 for Japan-North America. The fuel surcharge alone on JAL is the price of a cheap ticket from Hong Kong to Manila, Taipei or even Bangkok. Emirates passengers can laugh all the way to the bank. Or can they? The Dubai-based airline does not apply any separate fuel surcharge. The charges have been incorporated into the ticket as valid operating costs, a sensible tack other airlines could usefully emulate.

Air passengers are fair game and fees are legion. Think in-flight insurance, baggage fees (United and Northwest now charge $25 for a second bag on domestic routes, and low-cost carrier AirAsia charges for checked-in baggage), phone reservation add-ons, penalty charges for change of ticketed date (on UA this jumps from $100 to $150) and, in the United States, usurious fees for travelling pets that make no demands on cabin crew.

Last but not least there's code sharing, wherein your cheap ticket from rust-bucket carrier A might get you a flight with world-class carrier B, or the other way around. It happens all the time. Airlines call this economics. We call it gobbledegook.