jallison's Journal: Ticket Tax

I recently purchased two airline tickets to fly from Los Angeles to Baja California on Alaska Airlines. The base price of the tickets was $164.00 each, round-trip. Not bad. But each ticket had $84.79 of taxes added to it! That's a 52% tax. WTF???

AFAIK this wasn't an advertised price, but it could be. This is the sort of thing where you see the ad, think "hmmm...300 or so bucks for two of us to fly...not bad." Then it turns out that it's 500 bucks for two. What am I getting for that $169.58 of tax?