As vacationers bask in the northern hemisphere's summer sun, airlines are raising fuel surcharges or warning that hikes are on the horizon because oil prices are back on the boil.

Air France-KLM said yesterday that its surcharges would go up today for the seventh time since 2004 due to the extremely high oil prices that are nearing 80 dollars a barrel.

At Air France, an increase of 7.0 euros (9.0 dollars) on each leg of a long-haul flight will bring the total fuel surcharge to 116 euros on a roundtrip ticket between Paris and New York.

The cost of a similar KLM round-trip from Amsterdam will now include 130 euros in surcharges.

The cost of short-and medium-haul flights will also increase by a smaller margin.

The two carriers are following in the slipstream of Portuguese airline TAP and Thai Airways International, which have announced supplemental charges on some routes.

Meanwhile, Japan Airlines, the biggest Asian carrier and the leading Spanish airline Iberia have reported first-quarter and first-half losses respectively owing to soaring fuel costs.

British Airways has warned that it will have to pay between 50-600m pounds ($1.0-1.1bn) more in its current financial year for fuel than during 2005-2006.

BA chief executive Willie Walsh told journalists on Friday: it's going to be a year of two halves and it will be tougher in the second half.

Even the thriving low-cost airline Ryanair has warned of a possible fourth-quarter loss owing to soaring oil prices.

On Monday, they hit 78.64 dollars a barrel in London after British major BP said it was shutting down the biggest US oil field in Alaska, blindsiding oil traders who had been tracking chronic conflict in the Middle East along with oil-related unrest in Nigeria and Venezuela.

In Rotterdam, the price of jet fuel stood in early August at 0.46 euro cents per liter, an increase of 12.2 per cent from January and 31.5 pe rcent over one year, according to the French Union of Petroleum Industries.

Airlines have gotten used to such bad news, since they paid a total of 92 billion dollars for fuel in 2005, an increase of 50 per cent from the previous year.

The bill is expected to reach $112bn this year based on an average oil price of 66 dollars a barrel, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates.

Jet fuel has now become the single biggest expense for airlines and the sector expects to post an aggregate loss of $3.0bn in 2006 despite increased traffic.

Almost all carriers except the budget airlines have passed the extra cost on to passengers.

Among other ways they hope to deal with persistently higher fuel prices is by cutting costs, with IATA president Giovanni Gisignani noting recently that the generalisation of electronic tickets by the end of 2007 is an excellent example.

European carriers have also complained to the European Union that the companies that supply their fuel have taken unfair advantage of dominant positions in the market.

The industry is suffering already from todays exceptionally high fuel costs. The last thing we need is for those costs to be further inflated by unfair commercial practices, the Association of European Airlines said Monday.