Venezuela’s largest airport has implemented a “breathing fee”

Air travel is an excellent way to get from city to city. It’s also one of the only convenient ways to travel internationally which is why it sucks that the whole system is polluted with needless fees and taxes. I’m sure we’re all familiar with that mix of confusion and annoyance you get when you hop off of a plane and realize you just paid more money in fines than you did on the ticket. Half of the time you don’t even know that what you’re doing is a finable offense until after you’ve been charged. While most people would agree that these silly fines need to stop, there are those, such as this airport in Venezuela, who believe the opposite.

The Simon Bolivar International Airport of Maiquetia, Venezuela’s largest international airport, doesn’t think that fines are an issue at all. In fact, the airport believes that its passengers aren’t being fined enough and that it has a duty to supply them with as many infuriatingly ridiculous fines as it can come up with. The latest such fine that the airport, which is based in the country’s capital, Caracas, has come up with is the newly implemented “breathing fee”. No, that isn’t a joke. The airport is literally charging its passenger a 127 bolivar ($18) fine for the right to breathe the air that the airport provides for them.

The airport believes that this fine is perfectly justified because the proceeds are being used to cover the costs of a newly-installed system which uses ozone to purify the building’s air conditioning system. The country’s Ministry of Water and Air Transport claims that this is the first such system to be deployed in a South American airport and that this is being done to protect the health of travelers and deodorize the building by eliminating bacterial growth.

The fine has been met with a mixture of humor and outrage. One radio presented took to Twitter to question what an airport that has stray dogs roaming around and no water in its toilets is doing with an advanced air-purification system. Couldn’t that money be better spent elsewhere? Other Venezuelans are afraid that this could be yet another source of corruption in a country that is already suffering from some of the most prevalent corruption in the world. Read more about this story here.