Ryanair Attack Passengers Once Again
There is a classic piece of dubious language on the Ryanair site today. In an effort to ‘incentivise’ customers to travel light they are increasing baggage charges through the summer months.
Now I may be old fashioned but what they are actually doing is to penalise customers who want to take hold baggage? If they were incentivising they would be reducing the cost for those who travel light, wouldn’t they?
It should come as no surprise. Ryanair seems to care only about making money and if they could ship people in cattle trucks I expect they would be glad to reduce the price. There are, apparently, serious plans to charge customers to use toilets on short haul flights. I suspect that will be a financial mistake because who in their right mind will be paying rather steep prices for a cup of coffee or tea on the flight when it costs you a pound to get rid of it?
Apparently they plan to reduce the number of toilets and add a few more seats in their place. This may be the real reason for the proposed change but it makes traveling even more unpleasant if you need to worry about frequent use of the loo. Some people might find they end up spending more money on the loo than the flight cost them, if we ignore booking fees, baggage fees, checkin fees and a million other additional charges.
Time may prove me wrong but I suspect we have seen the peak of air travel as a pleasureable experience. I also suspect that we may see passenger numbers continue to decline even after the recession thanks to the feelings of disrespect air travelers now experience from airlines who are only interested in the bottom line on their accounts.
This is probably the most obvious example of a trend in recent years where companies are so concerned about reducing costs and making efficiencies and profits that they seem to have lost something from the customer experience. Yes, you can travel cheaper now than 20 years ago but is it a price worth paying? So many companies now seem to treat their customers as gold to be mined in the most efficient way possible with little thought apparently given to whether customers truly enjoy dealing with the company.
Companies like Ryanair will no doubt argue that customers continue to use their services because they are so cheap but is this really progress? Surely there is a middle ground where costs are managed but customers can still have a stress free experience, and are not left with the feeling they are being fleeced at every opportunity.
If the journey becomes a battle of wits between the company trying to find additional ways to charge you money and the customer trying to avoid the feeling of having been ripped off who really wins in the end? Probably nobody.
) For those people brought up relying on a calculator to do any arithmetic or those who never quite grasped the basics of maths it must be much harder.