So how to get to Indonesia reasonably cheaply at a time when fuel costs have rocketed, passenger demand depressed with global recessions and airlines racking up multi million dollar losses? Fares have risen by close to 50% in many cases from 2006/07 especially on longer haul routes with low competition.
No not the planes, but rather the PR department of an airline whose ability to create stories and repackage news is not even surpassed by politicians.
You will remember that for the summer season, Ryanair raised the cost of hold baggage to €20 for most bags and €30 for heavy ones. This was to last for July and August and return to the €15 level in September. Just after the school holidays and the busy summer travel season meant there was less opportunity for removing cash from passengers, but that is probably just coincidence.
The travel industry was one of the early adopters of the internet. These days searching travel and tourism websites is regularly listed as one of the top things to do. And obviously CD-Traveller readers have more interest in it than most since we are only available online. But how easy is it to use? Does a bad website put us off? Are some better at information than in accepting orders? Are pricing issues concealed until the last moment making customers wary of using them.
EDigitalResearch has provided some of the answers in their new study published this month. They have looked at 47 sites during the last two months and assessed the
Don’t think the two are related. It’s just that today, July 1st, there is some good news and some bad news concerning these two.
Firstly the good news.
To remind you, Ryanair have placed a £5 surcharge on hold luggage starting today and running till the end of August. Under the dubious guise of encouraging us to pack less, the surcharge is supposed to disuade us from carrying unwanted clothing and knick-knacks on holiday with us. As I wrote on 20th June, after Ryanair announced it’s concern for our inability to understand how much luggage we should pack, our grateful thanks should go to them for their helpfulness.
The media are fixated by best and worst lists, top 10 lists and anything that seems to imply a rating. Some are just the works of individuals, some have research behind them and some are people adding their thoughts to a website. And if one person says this destination is the best thing since sliced bread do you believe them?
In their July issue Which? have published the results of their survey into short-haul airline routes based on what their members think
Ryanair hasn’t featured for a couple of weeks and Virgin Atlantic even longer but it takes a lot to keep them away from the spotlight for too long. Ryanair have returned with an announcement that the 15kg hold baggage announcement has been increased to 20kgs,- provided that you pay for it.
At present it costs £15 for a 15kg piece of hold baggage. A second case would cost £35 for another 15kg bag. Now you can increase the weight of your first bag to 20kg and pay £25 for the privilege. Those extra 10kgs are costing you £2 per kg.
The world’s favourite airline, Ryanair, (well that is how they style themselves although passengers may disagree) has issued a press release championing itself as helping its passengers. They are urging passengers to travel light during peak Summer months. Is this an educational campaign they are running? Are they suggesting we pack more carefully? Are they saying they that we don’t need to, maybe, take everything with us when we travel? Do we really need to take a spare change of underwear? Such thoughtfulness deserves our thanks for the concern they have on our behalf.
And how do they propose to encourage us to travel lighter?
According to ABTA, about 2 million of us will leave the country to enjoy Easter abroad. And maybe some decent weather after the returning wintry conditions of this week.
It won’t come as a great surprise to many of you that Spanish resorts are doing well with Tenerife and the Canaries leading the way. You could also guess that Egypt and Turkey are doing well and so they are but Tunisia has also picked up a lot of bookings. Going slightly further afield, Florida is attracting the usual school age groups and booking seem to be up despite the fact that the biggest new attraction, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter doesn’t open until June 18th.
The usual places seem to fill the top spots each year for overseas citybreak destinations. Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin lead the pack with Milan and New York not far behind and this is despite the weakness of the pound against the euro and the dollar.
So who is going away?
The pigeons, the stone lions, Nelson and even the empty plinth might all be put in the shade if a race between Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ryanair and Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet ever takes place.
A couple of weeks ago, Ryanair ran an advertisement with Stelios having a nose like Pinocchio, the allegation being that easyJet was hiding the truth about the punctuality of the airline. As well as that, Ryanair in the shape of Michael Cawley, the Chief Operating Officer was interviewed on BBC Breakfast and alleged that easyJet was a high fare airline.
This has almost become a national pastime and I have contributed to quite a bit of it myself when it is deserved which is more often than not.
But when the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) criticises them (which isn’t as often as they should), you would hope they got their facts correct. Just one fact wrong and Ryanair will attack which is precisely what has just happened.
It began when John Fingleton, the chief executive of the OFT criticised the airline for only allowing one type of credit card to be used for payment that didn’t attract any sort of Ryanair fee. (This card is actually a pre-paid card so is it technically a credit card?)
If you haven’t already had enough of the hard sell that no frills airlines hit you with when you check-in and board their planes, then be prepared because more could be coming. Luckily it won’t be soon because the latest new advertising idea is only occurring on an American airline called AirTran.
About a quarter of a flight missed a flight from Liverpool to Belfast last Sunday because the gate changed and the passengers were unaware of this. Apparently, according to the BBC, the passengers rushed to the new gate to find that the pilot denied them boarding. Passengers were told they would have to pay extra to return to Belfast so who is to blame for this PR mess.
Liverpool Airport doesn’t make announcements so is it due to them for not making it clear to passengers? Is it the fault of the Servisair, who handle Ryanair flights at the airport and who should have wondered why 42 checked-in passengers all didn’t turn up
Even before the programme Panorama was aired last night, both Ryanair and the BBC were jostling for the high ground. Ryanair claimed the programme was doing a hatchet job on them. The BBC said that Ryanair wanted editorial control over the programme content. The BBC, Ryanair said, that Ryanair’s CEO, Michael O’Leary wouldn’t give an interview although he talked to the presenter, Vivian White and dominated the short interview. In fact White look ruffled as O’Leary dominated the questions.
Up until October 1st, if you flew Ryanair any old photo ID would do if you were flying just within the UK.. Now they will only accept a passport. Ryanair say this is “to simplify our identification policy to avoid passenger confusion.” Well you have to say that this sentence doesn’t help matters either. Who was confused beforehand? Nobody. Photo ID was anything that had your photograph on full stop.
Both Ryanair and easyjet have complained about the landing fees being charged by certain airports. According to easyjet, Luton Airport’s fees have risen by over 25% over the last few years and that it is why it has cut the number of flights operating from there. The same applies to the cutbacks by Ryanair at Manchester, Dublin and Stansted airports.
No this isn’t another moan about the quality or even quantity of customer service that Ryanair offers. Well not really. No this is a comment on what Ryanair thinks it does.You might have seen in yesterday’s media stories about how Ryanair has made €136.5 million profit (about £119 million) in the first 3 months of its trading for this year. As the largest airline in Europe, one that has grown very quickly from nothing to this status so quickly, that its management would be pretty
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Someone spotted that Ryanair charged the same price in euros as it did in pounds. This idea comes courtesy of 360travelguide.com which was picked up by the online trade magazine, Travolution.Because Ryanair say that a euro equals a pound, they were making an extra 16% clear profit over and above their usual profit if you pay in pounds. The suggestion is that whatever you buy, you pay with a large denomination note in euros and request the change in pounds. The example is that if
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The outbreak of a flu virus in Mexico has prompted some of the strangest media coverage. On the one hand, there have been the stories of returning holidaymakers suffering from flu like symptoms and the spread of the virus to other countries and on the other, plaintive stories of people who have had their holiday plans dashed as tour operators cancel their package holidays.It is too early to establish how severe this scare is but comments from Michael O’Leary of Ryanair claiming that it is
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Ryanair is the largest airline in Europe. Whether you like it or loathe it what it does can have a big impact of how we travel and how tourism happens. If it decides to get involved with an airport that airport had better play along to Ryanair’s rules or it just pulls out. Examples at Newquay and Blackpool Airports come to mind where those airports both tried to introduce surcharges on passengers (in the case of Blackpool they offered free parking in return) and Ryanair
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From tomorrow, 19th March there will be some new rules for checking in hold baggage. You can now check-in your hold baggage online but there will be a charge of £5. If you continue to use the airport check-in facilities, the price has risen slightly from £9.50 to £10.Up until then, you could only check-in online if you were an EU citizen. That changes and non-EU citizens will be allowed to check-in online as will those people who have reduced mobility.So what does this mean?It
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Well I suppose it had to come.After saying it would happen in 2006 and frequently in 2008, Ryanair introduced to passengers the chance to use their mobile phones on some flights yesterday. So if you feel like paying between £2 and £3 a call you can indulge yourself by saying unecessary things like “I’ll be landing in ten minutes” and “Can you put the kettle on in about half an hour” and other earth shattering items like that as you sit hunched up in the
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Yet again it is a combination of things rather than one that makes people think about whether they will have a holiday next year.The CBI’s November Service Sector Survey says that travel services companies are less optimistic than they were three months ago and they predict that optimism will decline further. So what’s new? It seems all we read about are downturns.Yesterday the pound hit a low point against the euro making the prospect of holidays in popular destinations like Spain, Italy, Greece and France
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When you see a press report about Ryanair, it usually makes good reading. Their Chief Executive, Michael O’Leary, is not known for bland language; some is more colourful than Gordon Ramsay’s so the announcement of his third quarter accounts is uasually not as boring as some that travel companies issue. Ryanair calls for the removal of Harry Bush, “the hopeless CAA regulator” who rubber stamped the crazy plan to build a second terminal at Stasted which Ryanair calls a “gold plated Taj Mahal.” They claim
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